


A Howl is Heard, She Wears an Iron Crown

by Ambrosia



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Cousin Incest, DID YOU REALLY THINK I WOULDN'T JOIN THIS TRASH CLUB, F/M, Fake Romance breeds jealous! Jon, GET ME A LEATHER JACKET, Ghost hates dany, Jaime + Sansa friendship, Mutual Pining, Political Jon, Queen you shall be
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-15
Updated: 2018-10-02
Packaged: 2019-04-23 03:11:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 40,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14323278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ambrosia/pseuds/Ambrosia
Summary: “I’m trying to protect you,” Jon grunts, tearing himself away from the window.But Sansa is there. Sansa isthere, against his arm, turning him around. “From what?”He’s breathing so fast he nearly can’t stop is body from humming, vibrating, he can’t keep his hands still or his eyes at any one place and it’s like it’s under his skin but Sansa just waits,waits, still like stone and the Lady of Winterfell and he isn’t the King-in-the-North-no-longer.And after a year, a decade, a lifetime, Jon says, brokenly, “Fromme.”Sansa does not move. Jon’s beginning to think that the gods could rip apart the ground beneath their feet and separate Westeros into two, east and west, and still Sansa would not move. She looks at him like she can see through him, through the parts he needs to keep from her. “There was once a time when I knew that the last person in Westeros, and Essos, and all the unknown and the dead lands— the last person I needed to be protected from was you.”





	1. Chapter One

The horns blow across the distant hills as Jaime Lannister stands on the ramparts of Winterfell, from the East. Granted, he hasn’t really been here long enough to pick out what kind of horns they are— a hunting party returning, a scout, an enemy appearing over the horizon like the Mad King’s Daughter and her damned dragons all over again, he can practically still smell the charred skin, but from the way that the guards all react and peer towards the sound, and the way that Lady Sansa stops in her tracks as she walks serenely alongside him, unbothered by the cold, he gathers that it is something important.

“They’ve returned,” the Lady of Winterfell remarks. “Early. They weren’t supposed to arrive from White Harbor for another fortnight.”

It doesn’t take a methodical mind like Tywin’s to figure out of whom she speaks. Jaime peers back over his shoulder and can pick them out amongst the white, riders cresting over a snowbank.

The only dark spots in an ocean for miles in any direction. “The King in the North?”

Lady Sansa is already striding away from him, but somehow against the howling wind he catches, “Not anymore.”

Jaime chances another glance out beyond the wall before he wraps his cloak tighter around his shoulders with his good arm. The fur helps, certainly, but his blessed Lannister blood is good for making gold, not for keeping him warm. He’d thought it’d been cold the last time he journeyed North. It’s even worse now.

But all he can see, squinting, against the white is a faint outline of riders slowly getting bigger and approaching the tent-city that has sprung up around Winterfell in the last fortnight. They have ten thousand various infantry and calvary between them, including the Knights of the Vale serving Lady Sansa. The leftover Wildlings that aren’t currently manning the Wall, though there are so few of them. A combination of Northern men from different houses: Glover, Mormont, Umber, and Karstark. Some smaller houses from the Riverlands and the Reach that have sent their own small forces that haven’t been killed by the last six years of war.

It is not enough. It’s not nearly enough. But it’s all that the wars have left them with. Ten thousand men from the seven corners of Westeros and _one_ Lannister.

He would have brought three thousand, if he could have. That at least would have been better than none.

Lady Sansa is already dictating orders to open the courtyard to Lord Royce and Maester Wolkan and the other assembled Northern Lords as she descends down the stairs, Jaime behind her two steps the whole way. To clear the training yard, the stables, the main courtyard, to roast three of their precious few deer for the feast that will no doubt need to be served to an incoming Queen, when their stores of fresh meat is waning as it is. She bids all the important members of the King’s Court come and greet these foreigners like the Starks always have: stoically but cordially. Ironically, command seems to suit Ned Stark’s daughter in a way that Jaime never predicted. Perhaps Brienne was right. Perhaps Jaime hasn’t met many girls like Sansa Stark.

His arrival at Winterfell has been _complex_ , at best, and there are those that Lady Stark gives orders to that spare enough of a moment to give him a threatening look: Jaime does not have the heart to tell them that he has faced much more frightening things than this, considering one of those things is about to enter Winterfell’s eastern gate.

Or enough fucks to muster up the energy to swat them away in this Northern cold.

Lady Sansa begins to adjust her dress and cloak while Jaime stands in the middle of the chaos, and while she is no Cersei with her endless number of perfect gowns with metalworking and matching jewels and a crown on top of it all, there is something royal that slips across her pale brow. Even as he watches she seems to age decades, from a girl not much older than Myrcella would have been, to a fully-grown wolf.

He has no white cloak to adjust now. No golden armor. Even his golden hand is hidden underneath the thickest fur gloves. The cold burns at the scarred skin and the metal too cool to touch.

But feeling like he should try and make himself— well, less like a miserable Lion in a frigid castle— he pulls the furs further up his shoulders, as best he can. Tries to.

It doesn’t work.

He struggles with one side for a moment with his bad hand while furiously grabbing at the metal clasp that holds it in place with his good, before his sworn oath takes pity on him.

“Here, Ser Jaime,” Sansa tells him, and he has to bend at the knee a little so that her hands can reach his collar.

She is quick and to the point, like any soldier. Jaime has enough time to take in her face, distantly, this— this Catelyn Stark resurgence, this _thing_ of ice and armor and honor, and wonders where the little thing that had pranced around Robert’s royal encampment with a pretty woven dress and a tamed dire wolf on a leash has gone.

If she notices his inspection, she does not let it show. She hefts the furs higher up his shoulders and tight around his collar, pins them in place. But her fingers seem to stray around the silvered wolf pin that keeps the cloak in place.

Her eyes— cold, blue, somehow Ned Stark’s, are far away.

He looks down at it, the wolf resting against his chest. And then comes, “I would ask a favor of you, Ser Jaime.”

Summoning up the ghost of who _Jaime_ _Lannister_ was supposed to be, once, a lifetime ago, he says, “If it is within my power, Lady Sansa, I shall give it.”

“When you swore your sword to me I told you that I would never ask you anything that would bring you dishonor.”

“You did, my Lady.”

“And yet sometimes it is honorable to do a dishonorable thing,” Lady Sansa says, quieter. Softer. Far away. Like it is painful. “Sometimes it is dishonorable to do an honorable thing. My father died in dishonor, but he was doing the most honorable thing a man could: throwing away his own honor for the safety of his family.”

Ned Stark had bent before the crown and had lost his head: he and Ned Stark had never seen eye to eye— had been enemies, really, towards the end, and Jaime at the time had been captured by Ned Stark’s _Lady Wife_. And his oldest wolf pup. Jaime Lannister: Kingslayer, sister-fucker, greatest swordsman since Ser Arthur Dayne and Ser Barristan Selmy— captured by a sixteen-year-old wolf with a third of Twyin Lannister's army. 

But still, Ned Stark had not deserved such a fate.

“What I ask you, Ser Jaime,” Sansa tells him, finally looking up and meeting his gaze and he is struck by how much iron there is. A ghost of the girl Cersei might have been, once, had life not been so cruel, peers up at him. “Is not honorable.”

Jaime has had enough of breaking oaths for several lifetimes, let alone his own, so his back straightens at her words. _Oathbreaker_. The former Lady Stark had called him thus, too. _Burn them all_. _Burn them all_!

_Oathbreaker_. It’s all the pages of his great deeds will say. A forty-two year old Knight with one hand. “Oh?”

Lady Sansa does not blink, does not look away from him, does not break the ice she uses for armor as she tells him, “I need you to fall in love with me.”

 

_________

 

Littlefinger has been cold in an unmarked grave just outside the Northern camps for twenty days. Sansa knows this.

She _knows_ that he is dead, as dead as Ramsay was in the kennels before she had them gutted to make room for more beds for the wounded. As dead as Father. As dead as Mother. As dead as Robb and Robb’s lady wife and their unborn child and Grey Wind and Rickon and Summer and Lady.

Yet Littlefinger stands beside her in the courtyard as Winterfell’s eastern gates open. Her revulsion is not an act, though every other aspect of this dance is.

It’s easy enough to forget that it is _Arya_ in there, somehow.

“We’ve been here before,” Not-Littlefinger murmurs. It sends another chill down Sansa’s spine, though she does not let it spread. It is his voice. His inflictions. His throat full of self-satisfaction. “Do you remember, my Lady?”

She does. She’s standing in Ned’s place in the courtyard. Jon’s place, if they were not suddenly on opposite sides of this meeting. Jaime stands in Mother’s place, and Littlefinger in Robb’s. Sansa remembers very clearly the Queen’s carriage and King Robert on his horse and watching Jaime Lannister, in his gold armor on his white horse, looking every inch the hero from the stories. Back when she believed in such things. Joffrey, too, as much as her own mind tries to protect itself from the memory. She peers back at it now and sees nothing but a self-important child on a white horse. Now, Joffrey feels much less monstrous after the others that came after. It feels as if the entire North has shifted underneath their feet since that day. It feels both like decades and only yesterday.

The little girl that had stood on Robb’s right-hand side and had smiled up at the Baratheon Prince and the Lady that now stands at the center of it all would not have recognized one another, Sansa thinks.

One would have walked down the hallway in King’s Landing and not even noticed the other.

“We all have a part to play, Lord Baelish,” Sansa whispers to him as even more horses file in, two-by-two.

The horses are shivering and slightly bloody, though she isn’t sure why this is the detail she notices. She cannot mark where they come from. They aren’t Dornish Sand Steeds or Crownland Destriers.

Said horses are suddenly very nervous of Ghost, as he plants himself firmly in front of Sansa’s skirts to keep these newcomers at bay.

He’s been a constant companion to her in the last three months, a _ghost_ , attached to her shadow wherever the role of Lady of Winterfell takes her. He follows her to the Godswood, and sits at her feet in the Great Hall. He climbs into her bed when he thinks she is sleeping. She pretends to mind, but there are other ghosts in Winterfell, too. Less kind ones. He sits next to the tub as she bathes and sniffs at her maids as they come in to wash her hair, calm as a windless day on the sea. He has not even gone to hunt in over a month— unusual, Sansa knows. Cannot help from twisting her fingers in his white coat. Lady is long dead but Ghost makes her feel like she is not fighting a war in every direction, like she has one single ally that expects nothing from her. That will never turn on her. Direwolves would never turn on a Stark, not like mad dogs turned on the Boltons.

Those first to dismount are just forerunners, Sansa doesn’t recognize their strange ragged armor or coat of arms, though eventually she begins to see familiar colors: the hardened thing inside her chest soars against her will as she spots the gray wolf on a field of white even if she can’t recognize the people.

But then Ser Davos and Brienne come through— it would be impossible to miss the way that Jaime suddenly stands taller at her side. And then—

Jon has always been the spitting image of Ned Stark, of their father. When she’d seen him for the first time in six years, at the Wall, she thought’d she’d come through the gates right into some strange alternate world where Ned Stark had been sent to serve out his life at the Wall, just like Cersei had promised. And something in Sansa _aches_ , breathes, breathes for the first time in ages like she’s been holding her breath, beats now, seeing him for the first time in months, alive and whole and _back_. And his cloak— her cloak, the one that she made for him all that time ago. It has somehow survived, too. He is alive: she cannot let anything else show. She cannot be anything more than the sister he left in charge. She cannot rush to his side like she did before, she cannot fling herself into his open arms. She cannot grab at his hands and pull him to her where she could feel his life under her fingers even as he slides off his horse and immediately begins to tend to it himself.

No. She can do none of these things. She is the Lady of Winterfell and Warden of the North and he _knelt_. The King gave away his crown.

Only allows herself a moment before the ice must crawl down her skin like Grayscale _._

She shutters anyway, because next to him is undoubtedly _her_. The reason for all this.

He looks around the courtyard, at all the souls that have assembled. Sansa knows the moment that his eyes catch on her, in Ned Stark's place, in  _his_ place.

“Sansa,” Jon breathes. He says it like it’s the first breath he’s drawn in ages. Like she is the first hint of the sun that he’s seen in weeks.

She does not let anything crack in her demeanor. She does not let the hurt cut through the courtesy, even if the black in his grey eyes is almost enough to pierce something Sansa can’t name. No, better ice. Better ice than the terrible storm making her fingers shake from where she is holding them inside the folds of her fur cloak, a storm made of an icy winter and a terrible tempest she can feel pulsing somewhere just beneath her skin. She would have once given anything to see him again after all this time, to welcome him back home, in the North, where all of her siblings belong. Once would have rejoiced, like she had with Bran and Arya when _they_ had found their way back to Winterfell. Back _home_. But that Sansa cannot show her face here. That time is long past.

Sansa curtsies, dips down, ever proper, ever upright, ever Catelyn-Come-Again. Ever Ned Stark’s Daughter. “My King.”

She does not see it, but she hears the rest of the courtyard bow and curtsy respectfully too. Something settles deep within her bones, something solid, that all of Winterfell had been waiting to see what their Lady would do.

She does spare a glance towards Not-Littlefinger as she does it. Not-Littlefinger who has been waiting for Jon’s return for more than two months. But Arya wears Petyr’s face well, _too well_ , almost, and she captures that smug sense of self importance, of being the best player in the game— so much that even Sansa believes. For a moment. Littlefinger does not move or show any sign that all is not exactly what it seems: Sansa, in the courtyard, surrounded by her allies. Petyr Baelish has not been dead for twenty days. Bows anyway.

He does not even gesture to them to rise like a King should: instead he waves them all up, impatient, she knows how ridiculous he feels being bowed at. Command suits him, he enjoys command, but doesn’t care for the ceremony of it all.

He would rather be a commander than a king.

Instead he drops the reins of his horse and comes straight towards her and seems to remember where they are, who he is, who _they are_ , who he’s brought, only at the very last moment. He stops perhaps two feet from where Sansa is rooted to Winterfell’s courtyard. “I’m,” Jon starts. Deflates. “I’m—I’ve returned.”

Not quite the words of a King.

Sansa chooses her next words like she would have with Joffrey. Carefully. Like one wrong word could be her last. “Welcome home, my King.”

_My King_. She sees the exact moment he knows all that she knows _._ The dragonglass. The _wight_. The meeting in King’s Landing.

Perhaps he feels guilt, for not writing. For making decisions for her without _asking_.

_Did it never occur to you that I may have some insight_?

But Sansa does not discard her mask, or her armor of ice. No, to the world, to anyone but Jon, she is composed and controlled, a Lady about to welcome guests into her House. To outsiders, they would see nothing but the King and his Lady.

But Jon does. She can see it in her brother. His dark eyes could drown the Greyjoys with how deep they go, fathomless, endless, she could slip beneath the surface and never miss the light as she sunk. She sees relief in them, too, a longing. But above all things, she sees regret.

“Your Grace,” Jon intones, turning to the woman beside him, offers his hand to the Targaryen Queen in a move that Sansa cannot help but catch. There is something in his voice, in his _gaze_ that reeks of guilt, of the way that he can now barely look at Sansa’s face. “My sister, the Lady Sansa, of House Stark. Lady of Winterfell and Warden of the North. Sansa, this is Daenerys Targaryen, the Rightful Queen of the Seven Kingdoms.”

She is beautiful. More beautiful than Margaery had been. More beautiful than Cersei. Until this very moment Sansa has had a void in her vision of anything that wasn’t Jon and the world seems to expand out of the whiteness, and there are thirty other outsiders in her courtyard again. Now, Sansa turns her gaze on her, revealing nothing, a mask of ice meeting a face of _winter_. Daenerys is gowned in the purest of white furs that must have belonged to white wolves, foxes, and rabbits, and looks more expensive than even Cersei’s gowns. Her hair, also the purest of white, is pulled back in styles that make even the extravagant southron styles seem ridiculous. Sansa notes the way she is trying not to shiver, to not look cold in the Northern wind, and the tight hold she has around Jon’s hand.

But she is beautiful. It hurts something in Sansa that has never hurt before.

_I’ve heard that she is very beautiful. She is young and unmarried_ , comes Littlefinger’s long-dead voice, though Arya wears his face next to her. _Jon is young, and unmarried_.

Something that shouldn’t _exist_ , she turns it inward like one of Arya’s knives. She is not a silly girl, she is the Lady of Winterfell. If not for her, Jon would have lost his crown three times over—

Before Bolton, she would have smiled and put on her most courteous face, because that is what Septa Mordane always taught her. Before Littlefinger. Before Margaery and Cersei and Joffrey. The time for playing that silly little girl is over: the time for the Lady of Winterfell and Warden of the North is at hand.

A Lady’s curtesy is her best armor, they had told her. Or so Sansa had been lied to a lifetime ago.

The curtsey she gives to this foreign Dragon Queen would only be called a curtsey in the right circles, in King’s Landing where every detail could be a craftily made insult, but Sansa is the blood of Winterfell and the First Men and nothing cracks the armor she has made from her skin. Not here. Not in Winterfell, where she is strongest. Not surrounded by wolves.

And she stands a head taller than the Dragon Queen, so her curtsey barely makes a dent in the difference anyway. In her most regal voice, ever Catelyn-come-again, Sansa says, “Welcome to Winterfell, your Grace.”

It is the Targaryen who breaks first, her lips curving upward in an almost otherworldly smile. It is the smile that Cersei Lannister had given her on their first meeting, right before she had asked: _and have you bled yet_?

“I thank you, Lady Sansa,” Daenerys begins. “Lord Snow told me much about Winterfell. I thank you for your generous welcome.”

No _welcome_ had been offered: if Jon had been so inclined to kneel in the south, he could have stayed in Dragonstone _._ No. Sansa knows these words for what they are, knows the look on Jon’s face and the dip in his brow.

He’d said no such thing.

_You have to be smarter than they were_ , she had told him, all those months ago. _Smarter than Father. Smarter than Robb. I loved them. I miss them_.

No. Two weeks past they had sent a raven from Dragonstone telling them of their intention to bring every army left after the armistice to Winterfell. He’d said nothing of anything else. Done it once again— left her behind to care for a crown that he’d given away at the first opportunity.

And Sansa does not miss the insult, either: _Lord Snow_.

To come into a King’s home and immediately denounce him as a King: Daenerys must feel confident that he will inform the other Northern Lords as soon as he possibly can. Sansa had told only the few that she absolutely trusted beyond a doubt, after Littlefinger. And, like her, they had not taken it well. It was the third time that they offered Sansa the crown of Queen in the North. And, against the Littlefinger-like voice somewhere in the back of her mind, she had denied them. But she cannot help the winter storm that flows through her at the outrage of it. _A monster has taken our brother and our home_. 

As if he has sensed Sansa’s thoughts, Ghost begins to growl. Sansa discards the ice, for a moment, and remembers that the direwolf comes up nearly to her ribcage. A fearsome sight for anyone not used to it: but their guests break their fasts with the Mother of Dragons. He must look like a pup to them.

She plants a hand on his shoulder. It does not calm him.

“Ghost,” Jon admonishes.

But contrary to Sansa’s expectations, Daenerys does not cower. Instead she looks fascinated by the direwolf and steps closer to Jon’s side, reaching out towards both him and Ghost, eyes full of wonder.

_Do not touch him_ — Sansa thinks with a fierce sort of protectiveness that surges out of a place so unused that she herself has forgotten it.

And then, “I would not recommend it, your Grace,” Jaime says, and Sansa, _foolish girl_ , has nearly forgotten he was there. “Direwolves don’t particularly know a dragon from other beasts. He may bite.”

As if to show he could, Ghost bares his teeth.

“Jaime Lannister,” says a voice on the Dragon Queen’s side, one of her advisors— a man that Sansa knows from somewhere, vaguely, he sounds like a northerner and doesn’t look at all bothered by the cold.

_No_ — Sansa has enough time to think. _Don’t—_

“You,” Daenerys says.

“ _You_ ,” Ser Jaime replies. In furs he looks more Stark than Lannister. “I didn’t have enough time at the Armistice to introduce myself. I am the Kingslayer, Jaime Lannister. T’was I that put my sword through your father’s back.”

“ _Jaime_ ,” Lord Tyrion, at Daenerys’ side, curses.

She should have sent him to the Broken Tower, or the First Keep, or anywhere where Daenerys would not immediately see the man who murdered her own father— what a stupid, stupid thing, an amateur mistake, a play that only the newest players of the game would dare put into motion. She’d only felt like she needed some sort of ally, up on the ramparts, she didn’t feel like she could face down Jon _and_ the Dragon Queen all on her own with Arya wearing Littlefinger’s face—she understands that it was a mistake even as Daenerys’ carefully constructed mask begins to melt and they can all see the rage as it comes boiling to the surface, even as Jon— _Jon_ , tugs at her sleeve and begins to whisper something in her ear, she begins to rage and the North is immediately on edge.

“I will _feed you_ to my dragons,” she begins. “I agreed to the ceasefire and _this_ is what your sister sends to me for my trouble? She sends you? Where are the armies she promised?”

“Just me, I’m afraid,” Jaime says.

“Your Grace—”

Sansa’s hold on Jaime tightens.

This was not the way that she meant to break this news: though hard news it had not been. Sansa Stark had known the day that Jon sent the raven detailing the plan of the armistice that Cersei Lannister would never comply by it. But now, watching as such a carefully constructed lie melts away and she finds something underneath, something too close to Joffrey, too close to Ramsey, Sansa knows she should have found another way. It is a dangerous game she is playing, though all the other big players on the board are already  _dead_.

“— _She’ll burn soon enough._ Bring me the Kingslayer, perhaps she’ll understand my meaning if I send her his _head_ —”

“Your Grace,” Sansa snaps, something foreign slipping into place, and it must hit the tone that she was striving for, something as if Catelyn Stark has taken one more breath in this world. The courtyard goes quiet, even as Brienne shifts from Jon’s side to Sansa’s. “Ser Jaime has sworn himself into my service.”

At this Jon whips away from where he has planted himself between them, his Commander’s mask falling away. He looks at Sansa like he must have misheard her but Daenerys ignores it all and the Unsullied look like they will obey her commands.

But a quiet descends over the courtyard as Tyrion curses and visibly puts a hand to his head like it pains him.

Jon asks, “He did what?”

By the utterly blank look on the Dragon Queen’s face, and the winces of several members of her entourage behind her— Tyrion Lannister and Lord Varys, if Sansa sees the face she thinks she does, Sansa assumes that the Dragon Queen’s advisors have not informed Daenerys of Northern customs, or how strictly those in the North adhere to them. Lord Glover and Lord Royce and their men look ready to draw their weapons, too, and it seems very likely that the White Walkers won’t need to storm Winterfell. They’ll be dead already.

“Your Grace,” Varys supplies. “The custom means that House Stark, and by extension, his Grace,” he gestures with his sleeves, to Jon, “Would have to draw arms against you should any harm befall Jaime Lannister while he remains in their care.”

“I am aware of the custom, ser,” Daenerys bites, with so much snap that Sansa nearly sees Cersei, all those years ago. “I am the _Queen_ ,” Daenerys says. “If I ask that Jaime Lannister’s spine be delivered to me by morning, _it will be so_.”

The North does not like that: they do not like that at all. Sansa can barely keep the Northern Lords from shouting and certainly not without letting the Dragon Queen’s retinue see what a tenuous hold she maintains. They do not even particularly like having a Lion in their midst but he is in _their_ Keep and belongs to _them._

But even as the fragile peace this meeting has bought begins to shatter like ice, outward, Daenerys’ retinue itself seems to crack. Begging her, whispering in her ear, and Jon, _Jon_ , in the center of it all.

“It means,” Jaime says, with an undercurrent of venom before Sansa can give him a sharp tug to get him to mind his tongue. “That as long as I faithfully serve House Stark, you cannot harm a hair on my very pretty head.”

Chaos erupts, shouting, the clang of swords being drawn and even Sansa’s carefully constructed ice falls away as she grabs at Jaime’s good hand to get him to be silent, gets her fingers into his fur and steps in front of him like she would not just as easily die should Daenerys demand his head or send her dragons to burn them: throws a hand out to the Knights of the Vale to get them to stand down. Uses that hand to catch Not-Littlefinger’s sleeve, because she may be deep beneath that self-satisfied smirk but it is _Arya_ in there, somewhere. Arya, who slit Littlefinger’s throat with little prompting. Arya, who ended House Frey.

Ghost snarls and Sansa knows that this will slip from between her fingers before she can catch it.

_The Dragons_ , Sansa desperately thinks, _where are the dragons_?

“Enough,” Jon commands. “I said, _enough_!”

Jon looks so angry then—Sansa expects the anger, rare and dark and deep, but not the burning. Not the way his face twists. Not the way his eyes look dark as an embers’ shadow.

But the courtyard stops at the sound of his command. All sides.

“We have fought and bled and _died_ for months now, broke our way through twenty miles of frozen bay, and this is what we turn to?” he demands, gesturing to the entire courtyard and all that are within it. He doesn’t wear a crown but he is easily the most kingly. “We did not sail from Dragonstone to King’s Landing and back to kill each other _now_!”

The whole courtyard goes silent and _this_ is the Jon that Sansa knows. Not her brother, not the bastard on the Wall, but a King. Robb’s shadow-no-longer.

Until he turns back around again and his eyes catch on Sansa and something shifts that she doesn’t recognize.

She is still in Father’s place. Still tall, iron-backed, though she has shifted so that out of all of the North, she is the one that Daenerys would have to go through first. Somehow her hand has caught around Jaime’s wrist to hold him back, and has dragged him so that he is slightly behind her.

No one speaks, not even Daenerys. Sansa watches as she looks to each of her advisors and then to Jon and Sansa and Jaime, watches as her eyes take in all two thousand souls in Winterfell itself. Sansa almost sees her realign to the image that she so obviously took great care in presenting, as any Queen does.

She does not vocalize it, but she nods her head faintly.

She will not order the removal of Ser Jaime’s head while he serves House Stark.

Sansa does not show her relief. Or her triumph. Her first, against the Dragon Queen.

“Well,” says Tyrion, breaking the tension. He is shorter than Sansa remembers, though she hasn’t grown that much since they last met. In the physical sense. All eyes in the courtyard turn to him. “I never thought I would say this, but I am very happy to see you, Lady Stark.”

The courtyard disperses, slightly, exhales like as a collective they have been holding their breath. Even Sansa lets go of Jaime and Littlefinger and regains some of the mask that is the Lady of Winterfell.

Tyrion Lannister had been a well-meaning drunkard, but a drunkard all the same. Still a Lannister. Not the worst Lannister, perhaps not even a _bad_ Lannister. But Lannisters and Starks had nothing but bad blood between them, ever since Robb’s war. If someone had come and whispered in her ear as she was being beaten by Ser Ilyn Payne that she would one day have a Lannister on one arm, with a different kind of definition of loyalty— an _ally_ — she would not have believed it. She had never loved Tyrion. She had been so young. Young and in mourning. No, she had never loved Tyrion. Not anywhere near to how a wife loves a husband. But she cannot deny that her first husband was much preferable to her second.

So Sansa offers a small smile to Tyrion. To break the tension. To ease over this… unforeseen conflict.

To play the part of the Lady of Winterfell. But it is not her Petyr smile. Or her Cersei smile, or her Lysa smile. It is something hesitant and sincere, small, because the ice is still against her skin. But real.

She hadn’t expected to see him again, either. “As am I, Lord Tyrion.”

She does not have time to assess it before Tyrion takes her offered hand and kisses the back of her knuckles. Not a declaration of loyalty, down on his knees, because not even Sansa would know what to do with the Dragon Queen’s Hand and Winterfell’s apparent new ally swearing himself to her service, but she does feel Jaime and Brienne shift at her side and is suddenly glad that they are her sworn-shields.

Somewhere, _somewhere_ , again is a voice at the very edge of her mind that sounds very much like Littlefinger: _sometimes when I’m trying to understand a person’s motives, I like to play a little game_.

The ice slides back into place as Tyrion begins to introduce the rest of the foreign strangers to Sansa’s home. Missandei of Naath, Lord Jorah Mormont, Grey Worm. Lord Varys, who does not have the shame to avoid her gaze.

One by one, they curtsey and bow to her— her, the Lady of Winterfell, when they stand in the presence of a King and Queen.

Sansa does not miss the fact that half of Daenerys’ allies, if Petyr’s _little birds_ are to be believed, are missing. Dorne _and_ Highgarden have abandoned her, it seems.

And the Iron Islands.

“I’m sure you are all exhausted from your journey and not used to the real cold,” Sansa tells them, not missing the way that half of them seem frozen straight through and eager to fix the tear that Jaime has torn. She is the Lady of Winterfell once again. “Come, there are fires lit inside and a feast soon.”

 

_________

 

It feels as if he has been away from Winterfell for years. Everything is different. The people— the landscape, the number of furnished rooms and beds for the injured.

The promise of food and warmth seems as if it has cooled southern tempers. He leaves the Dragon Queen’s entourage to their own business after the steward shows them where they may rest and looks to the North’s, asking after the Maester and Lord Royce, who give him only the briefest updates. The Dead march Westward, as Jon and Daenerys’ company were unfortunate enough to see firsthand after landing at White Harbor. It is a slow march, but the dead do not have to stop and rest overnight. And yet there seems to be something strange, amongst his own people— they seem almost surprised to see him, and even more surprised when he asks after them and their men, asks after the welfare of Winterfell. He’d known, _always_ known, that he was leaving the North in the best hands, in Sansa’s hands. He wouldn’t have left otherwise, as important as the dragonglass and dragons had been. Sansa would know how to rule in his absence and he trusted her judgement.

But it’s as if he’d left no empty place in his absence. No void to refill on his return. No duties to tend to. No reason to take up space in an already overcrowded castle.

No sign of Arya, or Bran— though all of Sansa’s letters told him that Bran would likely be in the Godswood.

Her letters had been the only reprieve for him on Dragonstone, though she had told him that all of their communication would be read by several parties, including the Dragon Queen’s.

Yet the letters had seemed to burn a hole under his shirt, where he kept them.

And Sansa—

Sansa’s feast is grand, by northern standards. Three elk have been pit roasted over the fire in the large hearth and some of the better ales served from their stores: he can already see the bitter looks on some of the Northern Lord’s faces that some of the best food is being served for their foreign guests.

Jon hears whispers, too, mostly of how quick Lady Sansa was to get this feast prepared in just a few short hours with almost no notice, and he feels that sour guilt race up his abdomen and into his throat.

“Is something the matter, my lord?” Daenerys asks, sipping her wine. The good Northern Ale was too harsh for her liking.

She sits to his left, in the place of honor. She has changed into a dress that Jon has never seen before, nor does he know how she managed to get it to Winterfell.

They’d left most of the unimportant cargo for the Unsullied and Dothraki to bring as soon as the rest of the armada can make it through the ice.

“It’s nothing, your Grace,” Jon says, though as hard as he tries he cannot keep his eyes off the Kingslayer, where he moves across the floor to come to their table. His fingers tighten around his mug of ale.

He looks away, sharply, when the Kingslayer takes the now-unoccupied seat on Sansa’s right, near the end of the table.

That stirs some of that guilt, too. The Lady of Winterfell, made to sit on the outskirts of the Stark table, in her own home.

A hand curls its way around his forearm in a way that is not indecent in of itself, but it makes him jump and he is suddenly grateful that he’s kept the furs Sansa made for him on throughout the meal, despite the rising temperature of the Great Hall.

“Perhaps you should retire early, my Lord,” Daenerys says, with a hint of suggestion in her voice. “You look tired, and weary from the journey.”

The way that Daenerys’ fingers play along the stitching of his fur leaves no room for miscommunication. Yet Jon’s gaze can focus only on the intricate stitching itself, and every inch of his consciousness strains to hear what is being said on his right. Can’t pick out any words, over the general hum. The Kingslayer's voice carries much farther than his sister's.

“I’m not tired, your Grace,” Jon offers instead. _This is what you bought_.

He does not know if she buys his lie, but before long her attentions have drifted elsewhere. And elsewhere’s problems are tomorrow’s problems.

But Jon is now unhindered from where his attentions truly lie. Sansa has been quiet for the majority of the meal, but now the Kingslayer holds her attention single-handily. And yet there is something _other_ , something unfamiliar, something burning— inside Jon’s chest that seems to inhale every time Jon chances a look at his sister. Cannot stop himself from marveling that she looks like something out of an ancient portrait, some lady from the songs, red and severe and cold, too, in her black northern furs. And sitting next to _him_ , the golden Knight, even if he’s no longer golden. A matched pair. The Kingslayer says something that Jon cannot hear but for the first time in months, Jon hears his sister laugh. Not fully. Not like they had laughed that day, at the Wall. But a smile, genuine. Not the false smile of a mask. That alone is enough to distract him from his own, stoic thoughts.

He hadn’t been gone that long— yet Jon feels like every last thing inside Winterfell changed in his absence. His longing to be back within Winterfell’s walls is echoing strangely hollow.

 

_________

 

In the Godswood while the rest of Winterfell and their guests eat and take shelter from the storm, the Three-Eyed Raven sits next to the Weirwood tree and _listens_. Bran Stark’s ears hear distant waddling footsteps and knows the conversation and where it will lead to before it happens.

But Samwell Tarly tries anyway. “I tried to get his attention, but I don’t think I can get anywhere near him. Do you think we should tell him tonight? It does seem, well, important.”

The Three-Eyed Raven just says, “Things have changed. Revealing it now would do more harm than good.”

 

_________

 

Night doesn’t come soon enough, for Jon. He makes his excuses, tries to come up with something tangible when the Dragon Queen again asks if they could speak in his chambers, but within the stone walls of Winterfell that question seems to choke him.

He makes an excuse about needing to speak to his own advisors in private.

It _isn’t_ a lie: he does need to speak to his advisors. He made… _plays_ , in the South, if that’s what they could be called. Sacrifices for the good of all the living. Not all of them had panned out.

But Davos has disappeared after the feast, Tormund is still in Eastwatch-by-the-Sea, and the Northern Lords have dispersed to make their own preparations, glaring at the foreign parties inside the Keep and outside it.

It is Sansa that he needs to speak to, now, for she is his most trusted advisor.

But Sansa does not come. He’d barely been able to catch her eye, during the feast, to pull her aside and ask to speak with her. Her welcome had been the only thing keeping him on his horse after they reached White Harbor, battling the ice the whole way.

But she had not even smiled at him: the girl that had thrown herself into his arms at the Wall was nowhere to be found.

Jon puts his head in his hands. It has been a long journey. Not just his journey south to Dragonstone and to King’s Landing, but all of it. He hasn’t rested well since the Wall, since before he was betrayed and killed and brought back. He’s tired of fighting— tired, but has the misfortune of being very good at it. Sansa had been right, he had no head for politics. In his mind it is just easier to tell the truth: if everyone told the truth then trusting each other wouldn’t be such a gamble. With everything, all of it, everything that he had to carry, every lie, every feeling he shoved down or shoved away, his shoulders have grown tenser and his sleep less restive. Most mornings he wakes as if he had never shut his eyes at all. The only exception to this had been the nights before they had retaken Winterfell, in the warmth of Castle Black’s rooms. With Sansa and Ghost and bad ale and passable soup.

Listening to Sansa sleep beneath his furs had been the first time in six years that Jon had felt like he didn’t need to unsheathe Longclaw at every passing shadow.

But now he is here, in Winterfell. With his prize.

It rings so hollow it makes his hands shake. What has he done?

He had known that she possessed a temper. Any person that could look at a beast the size of a small castle and call them _children_ possessed a view of the world that was quite skewed. But today only proved that, proved how little it took to ignite the kindling and how much effort it would take to soothe her bruised pride.

Jon had no doubt that he would need to spend most of tomorrow trying to erase Cersei’s apparent betrayal, instead of planning for the upcoming war.

And he had brought them here, the Dragon Queen and her children. He had at least had the foresight to forbid the dragons entering Winterfell as one of his conditions, back in Dragonstone. Daenerys had initially refused, but he'd reasoned that holding two dragons in the middle of twenty thousand soldiers was not likely to win her any favors. Her soldiers knew the dragons, but Westeros only knew them as destroyers. From what Daenerys has said, the dragons are circling over White Harbor, hunting in the woods near the port city.  _They will know when their mother needs them_.

_Mother_. He had brought this home.

To his home. His people. His family.

What kind of king was he?

Sansa’s voice comes to him, from what seems like years ago: _you can’t protect me. Nobody can protect anyone_.

_You fool_ , Jon thinks. _You fucking fool_. _You should have listened_.

A knock at the door rips him away from his thoughts and he’s surprised to find that the fire, which he could have sworn he had stocked just a few moments ago, is cool and full of red embers.

The empty mug of ale in his hands clatters against the chair as he stands and moves through the near-dark to his door, the door to Robb’s old rooms. He opens the door cautiously, fearing the worst— fears that he would have another visit from the Dragon Queen to strain under the guilt of.

But like his thoughts have summoned her, it’s Sansa, dressed in her full furs with a candle in her hand, Ghost snuffling the stone next to her. For a breathless moment Jon thinks that she is a dream, red and pale, half-hidden in the shadow of the corridor. He opens the door further but she does not step inside.

Somewhere Jon is unwilling to admit that he’s had dreams like this since the Red Witch brought him back.

Perhaps she has come to ask for entrance into his rooms, like she used to, _before_ , to speak about the day’s events like they had before he’d gone south, or sometimes just to sit with him to ward away the nightmares that they both had. Some nights they would just sit and not say anything. Others they would talk just in fear of having to listen to the wind howling.

He’s missed those nights. They’d had precious view of them before he’d decided to go south to seek the dragonglass.

Dragonstone had been a torment for him. Constant storms and winds, and most nights he and Davos spent just waiting for time to pass. “Sansa, what’s the matter?”

His sister says nothing. She just stares at him. _Gods_ , he thinks, _what do I look like_?

A broken man? A tired, green boy? A dead thing? A dead King? _What do you see, Sansa_ , he wants to ask. _What did you see today that made you put on so much armor_?

And Jon feels it in his bones, the way that Sansa is looking through him, blue like winter roses, like the spring sky, like the oldest ice. “Sansa?”

She is an ancient thing and far away and Jon nearly takes a step forward, the words nearly come bursting out of his mouth— _I did what you wanted_ and _I’m sorry_ and _I did things that you will hate me for_ and _I was only trying to protect us_ —

But then the moment dissipates. That _thing_ on his sister’s face fades and there is only Sansa left, tired, overworked Sansa, without the mask, who looks like she hasn’t slept in weeks. The Sansa he knows. The one he’d missed with such a terrible thirst that it could have drunk the salt seas dry.

She turns and the moment is broken and she’s disappearing into the dark while she says, “Come, Jon.”

He comes. He barely has enough forethought to grab the furs Sansa made for him before he is following her out of the Main Keep and into the Godswood in the middle of the night.

There aren’t many guards— some, at the normal guard posts, but all is quiet and all seem to be expecting the Lady of Winterfell and her direwolf: Jon’s had dreams of taking walks through the Godswood at night when the whole of Winterfell sleeps, of Sansa carding her fingers through his fur and taking comfort in his body heat someplace where she does not have to wear the mantle of _Lady_. Of listening to her let her fears out, her bitterness out, her frustration. Her anger.

The guards only straighten suddenly when they see the King in the North following along behind her. If Sansa notices, she doesn’t mention it.

She nods at them and they go back to their duties as they cross through the gate to the Godswood.

It is cold, and distant, and terribly sad. Calm and biting all at once.

He knows he should have come to visit sooner, to kneel before the Heart Tree. Like he could ask it to return something of what the South had taken.

“There are things we need to discuss,” Jon tries. “Maybe it’s best that it be out here.”

_I fucked the Dragon Queen_ nearly comes tumbling out of him, too, the guilt tastes so sour, and he has to clamp down on that, the urge to confess to Sansa.

She is his _sister_ , by all the Gods. She— she doesn’t need to know that. She does not need to know how he’d climbed into her bed, how he’d— he’d—

But Sansa does not seem concerned, does not seem concerned at all that he has brought a Dragon Queen to their door, or the price he had to pay to bring her here. Just continues to step towards the Godswood with purpose, with something in her spine, to the Weirwood, where not even the Northern winter wind can reach. And he hates it even still, because even _here_ he has those old thoughts in his mind, how she looks, how much he’s missed her— _them_ — how good it is to be home again, how she had been right, he should have listened, he’s gotten them into a _mess_ —

His words tumble away as he spots a figure wrapped in furs sitting between the pale roots. Sansa sets the candle down in the snow as Ghost moves around the lake to sniff and whispers in the figure’s ear, pulls his furs further up his shoulder in a move that she has done for Jon so many times he has lost count.

Before he knows it, he finds himself in front of the figure, sitting in a chair with wheels built into the sides like Maester Aemon had once had. “Bran,” Jon breathes.

“Hello, Jon.”

Sansa stays by Bran’s side, but when Jon looks at her, for an answer to the question he can’t bring himself to ask as he sinks down onto his knees in the snow, questions like _how_ and _where have you been_ , he sees it in Sansa’s gaze. She can barely look at him.

_Oh_ , Jon thinks. _That is what it tastes like_.

“What you said was true,” Bran tells him. “We have important matters we need to discuss.”

Bran shares a look with Sansa and their sister nods, already moving to pick up the candle and disappears where the darkness lies all around them, like a veil.

Jon watches her go, but his attention is torn. Because  _Bran_. He has not seen Bran since he was near-dead, after his fall.

Her letters had mentioned— _something_ — about Bran, but they had been vague. Purposefully so. She had warned him: _every scroll and letter will be picked apart and read by every spy in Dragonstone. Cersei’s, and Varys’, and Littlefinger’s._ It’s all Jon can think about as he crouches in the snow, next to Bran’s chair, to get a better look at his only remaining brother. Long ago, there had been four Stark sons. Now there are two.

“Look at you,” Jon says. “You got old, Bran. I can’t believe how tall you’ve gotten.”

He’ll be taller than Robb full-grown, Jon knows. Bran has Robb’s look about him, but so had Rickon. _Rickon_ , who’d died running from Ramsay, who Jon couldn’t save. _Gods_ , Jon thinks as he puts a hand to Bran’s cheek. _What did the world take from us_?

“Yes,” Bran says, but there’s something wrong in it, _something_ , a complete lack of any emotion on his brother’s face. “Things have been set in motion that cannot be undone.”

Jon hears footsteps crunching in new snow, and turns.

_Important matters_ did not mean _Littlefinger_. He’s on his feet and out of the snow in an instant. “Why is _he_ here?”

“He has been instrumental to us, Jon,” Sansa tells him, seeming like she glides through the snowfall, unbothered. _Red and severe and beautiful_. “If not for _him_ , the North would have been lost.”

Littlefinger descends down the slope of the roots to the Heart Tree in the _way_ that he does, like Littlefinger belongs in Winterfell and Jon is the stranger here. And the knowledge that Littlefinger has sat beside Sansa, his _sister_ , and whispered in her ear for all these months, Jon can barely stand it, he grits his teeth like they would grow sharp, he feels that dark thing building up in him again that had made him grab Littlefinger by his throat before he had gone south. But even as Jon glares, something is wrong, something is shifting, and Littlefinger pulls at his own face and it slips off like wet paper.

Jon blinks a few times, rage forgotten.

He has seen things beyond the Wall that no other man has lived to see. But, this? It’s not, it _can’t be_ —

Arya grins, “Hello, Jon.”

 


	2. Chapter Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “So,” Jaime huffs out. “The great Kingslayer, Oathbreaker, Man-Without-Honor. In love with a woman half his age, heir of House Stark, and Lady of Winterfell. This is the favor you ask of me— and I do intend on granting it. But I’ll have you know, my Lady, that I’ll probably lose a fight to the death for your honor. My left hand just isn’t the same as my right was.”
> 
> “There will be no need for fighting, Ser Jaime,” Lady Sansa says, with a tiny spark of a smile. “You are not the only piece I have yet to play.”

“What have you done,” Jon demands, feeling the look of disbelief across his own features. “ _What have you done_ , Sansa?”

It’s all he can muster, it’s all he can get to come out of his stupid mouth, ripped away from Arya’s face— _Arya_ , she’s grown so much he can hardly stand it, she’d been, what, ten, the last time they’d met— and _Bran_ and Ghost and _Sansa_ , who knew, who must have known in the courtyard that Littlefinger was no Littlefinger at all—

Sansa does not flinch at his anger, though she might have once. She looks to Arya, cold once again, and withdraws into this statue that she has become since his return. And Arya— Arya shrugs her shoulders and grins.

She looks odd in Littlefinger’s formal clothing, big on her tiny frame, suddenly, like it is the face-mask itself that makes her near a foot taller than she really is.

Jon feels like the _thing_ keeping his feet planted in the snow has vanished, like he could fall over at any point. He looks to them, his siblings, the only Stark siblings he has. They do not look like people, here, but especially Arya and Sansa, they don’t, there is something _missing_ in them, and yet they are more, too— they look like wolves, gaunt and dark and hungry and grinning, like wolves, too, all _teeth_ , their breathes making thin fog as it escapes from them in the snow, in the Godswood, where they _belong_ in some sense more than physical, and now that they are standing next to one another right before him, he can’t deny it. They are two pups from the same pack. It’s in the eyes, he thinks. And Bran, Bran is something other. Something older.

If he’s looking for some sort of trace of the children they had all once been, he cannot find them.

“I protected the North,” Sansa tells him, like she is explaining something to a very small child and it doesn’t help the _thing_ trying to burn him from within. “As you commanded, your Grace.”

 _Your Grace_.

“So you killed him?” Jon asks. “You said that you trusted him— that we needed him.”

“I never _trusted_ Littlefinger,” Sansa bites. “We needed his Knights. He was so confident his plans leaked out of his every pore. He reeked of it. I did what was best for House Stark.”

Jon runs his fingers through his knotted hair, he hadn’t even thought to bring his gloves, and turns away. The difficulty breathing has come back, too. “We did not need this. We did not need this now, Sansa. We have enough to worry about between the Dead and Cersei and the Greyjoys and the Freys without having to hide the fact that you murdered _the Lord Protector_ of the Vale!”

But almost immediately, Arya scoffs. “You don’t need to worry about the Freys.”

The air grows silent. As silent as graves, as silent as the Old Gods no matter how much they beg.

“Don’t need to worry about the Freys,” Jon repeats. “Lord Walder and all his sons were murdered over their dinner plates.”

“Because Arya killed them,” Bran says, in that voice that is wrong. “Killed Black Walder and Lothar Walder and baked them into a pie that the Late Lord Frey ate. Stole his face and poisoned the wine of every Walder that’d helped at the Red Wedding.”

Sansa and Arya both look at Bran as he reveals this information and do not seem bothered in the slightest, even as Jon gapes.

“You baked his sons,” Jon begins, very carefully. “Into _pies_.”

This thing that is Arya shrugs, and pulls some small object out of her pocket that Jon can’t see and begins to play with it. “T’weren’t very good pies. I didn’t let the dough rise enough.”

“Jon,” Sansa says.

He looks to her and _pleads_ , tries to find the Sansa that he knows, the Sansa that he’s missed for months, the Sansa that he’d spent days on end on the cliffs of Dragonstone cursing because she had been right— to make her see that their sister is not their sister and he’s floundering.

“You knew of this?” he begs her. “ _Sansa_.”

The look on Sansa’s face is enough. He knows it well.

“He offered them bread and salt,” Arya shrugs once again. “Bad things always happen to people that don’t respect the old ways.”

He does not miss the jab at Daenerys, not even him, and he isn’t good at the Game. This must be another one of his dreams, this cannot be _real_.

He should have left the Wall, when Father was taken captive, shouldn’t he? He should have let Sam and Pyp and Grenn convince him to come back. He might have been able to save Robb and Lady Catelyn from dying. Might have been able to save Rickon. Might have been able to rescue Sansa from Littlefinger long before he got his little fingers into her. Might have been able to stop Arya from becoming— _this_. And Jon sees it again, he sees the _things_ that have replaced his siblings. He has seen things north of the Wall that would convince even the most stout-hearted men of things beyond their comprehension, but Jon cannot grasp this— _whatever_ it is. His eldest sister accused, sentenced, and ordered the death of a man she claimed they needed and his youngest sister killed two full grown men and fed them to their father.

“And you had no thought about what the Frey children will do when they found out House Stark poisoned their wine? Children grow _up_ , Arya, into angry men and women that will stop at nothing to harm us!”

The Arya that she had once been would have screamed at him, yelled at him, and a part of him is looking for that somewhere. But Arya does not scream. She is still, but smiles, all teeth: “I killed the people that killed Mother and Robb and Grey Wind.”

“What have you become,” Jon wonders. “Arya— Sansa. What would Father think?”

“He doesn’t think anything,” Arya supplies for him. “He’s _dead_.”

There is nothing that passes across Arya’s face. _Nothing_. They were statues in the Godswood, statues, like down in the crypts, like Robb and Rickon. The World had eaten two girls and spit out _this_.

“And you,” he says, looking to Sansa. _Red and severe and beautiful_. “Why did you not tell me about Littlefinger? I could have helped you. I would have—”

Even as the words come out, Jon knows that they are lies. He’d been stuck on Dragonstone, or north of the Wall, or at the armistice in King’s Landing all for an alliance that had fallen through anyway. He wants to say _I would have protected you_ , wants it so badly that he could burst and Sansa must understand what he wants to say because the shadows along her features have lengthened and there is something _else_ about it that Jon can’t name. He stops, the words dying before they even get to his throat. He wants to say _I would have killed him if you asked it of me_ , because he would have, because the dark thing that he’d come back with wanted to rip at Littlefinger’s throat and squeeze until the slimy cunt twitched, because he’d _wanted_ what was not his to want.

Because Jon’d left anyway— because he’d left anyway, even knowing. Even _knowing_ —

“Winter came for Lord Baelish,” Sansa tells him at last. Regal. The Lady of Winterfell once again. “And winter came for House Frey.”

Starks are Direwolves and wolves hunt as a pack and Jon knows this, he knows the Stark words, the sayings and the whispers, they used to whisper even up to the Wall that the Young Wolf could transform into a Direwolf himself but Jon has always dismissed it as ale-talk, folk-tales, stories for sweet summer children who have never known a real winter.

But now— now he sees it. _Starks hunt in a pack_.

“Leave one wolf alive,” Bran adds, as if he can hear Jon’s very thoughts. “And the sheep are never safe.”

Jon shakes his head and backs away from them like you would back away from a wild Direwolf, backwards, keeping your front and your eyes on them, never turning your back on them for fear that they would rip into your neck. Someone calls for him, a soft voice that he misses, but he’s already turned and heads back towards the Great Hall and out of the Godswood. He’d dreamed of a reunion with all of his siblings on Dragonstone, when he’d learnt that both Bran and Arya had returned. This is the farthest from that he could have even thought of.

But then again: can he really judge his siblings not being the children they had been, once? Where is the boy that Jon Snow killed, to let the man be born?

 

_________

 

When Jon leaves the Godswood and Sansa, Arya, and Bran are all that remain, Ghost appears at Sansa’s side. It is a relief: she was afraid that Ghost would finally return to his master now that Jon’s come back to Winterfell, and had not quite known what she would do if he did. A Stark without a Direwolf is a lonely thing: she was the first to lose hers. Robb was the second. But she would not be able to blame Ghost if he did. There is something even in Sansa that grows taut as Jon disappears into the early morning fog.

When Jon was away she had learned how it felt to miss something like there was a cavern inside her chest. Some burning thing that she’d only grown used to before it was gone.

She tugs on Ghost’s scruff and scrubs the bridge of his nose when he presents his face to her.

His red eyes are a comfort. Makes it so her shoulders don’t strain so taut. Puts her at ease. _The way that Jon used to_.

Arya holds Littlefinger’s mask and must put it back on, soon, Sansa knows. “You think we told him too much?”

It had not been Sansa’s intention to reveal all these secrets to Jon, not when she no longer knew where his loyalties lay. Before, she would have. Had he come back just the same as he left she would have thrown her arms around his neck and brought him to Arya and Bran, so they could be whole again. But since his raven— no. The Jon she knew would have never given his crown so freely. But he had.

Her task had been to bring him to the Godswood, where they could speak safe from listening ears. Ghost assured that.

“No,” Sansa says. “Our King has stomached much worse. He did not even see Father lose his head. There is a mantle that must be carried by those of us who did.”

“Arya,” comes Bran’s far-off voice. The voice of the Three-Eyed Raven. She and Arya both turn towards their brother. His eyes are not white, but he is not _Bran_ , either. The both of them are used to this by now, as odd as it seems. “Stay out of the Spider’s reach.”

Arya looks to Sansa, perhaps for clarification, but Sansa has just as much trouble putting the pieces together.

She thinks, for a moment, and tries to remember her days in the Red Keep. “Lord Varys and Littlefinger knew each other for a very long time. It may be difficult to act the part with him. Perhaps he knows something we don’t.”

 

_________

 

“Ser Davos tells me that the rest of the Dothraki and the Unsullied will be here in a few days,” Lady Sansa informs him the morning after the Dragon Queen’s arrival. “Which, by his estimates, will bring us to twenty thousand infantry and four thousand calvary, with more coming every day.”

“Oh, I don’t expect them for a few weeks, at least,” Jaime says. “Westerosi armies aren’t used to marching in three feet of snow, let alone Essosi armies. They’re probably freezing to death in their horse leather as we speak. Even _I_ barely managed to make it past Moat Cailin before the real snow set in. No. Double the time it will take the armies of the Seven Kingdoms and the Dragon Queen to arrive. Transporting armies and feeding them are the most difficult parts of a campaign, my Lady.”

Lady Sansa frowns, in the corner of Jaime’s vision.

She has said herself that she knows nothing of battles or armies, confessed it to him on one of Jaime’s first days as her Sworn Shield, but expressed the desire for him to teach her all he can.

She guesses at the point he is try to make, “They won’t get here fast enough, will they?”

She’s an apt student. But she would have to be, wouldn’t she? To have outlived Littlefinger.

They are standing on the upper levels of Winterfell’s southern ramparts, overlooking the kitchens, the stables, and the courtyard. The morning has been a busy one— for Lady Sansa, not for him. His only duty thus far has been to stand around looking Knightly and whisper lessons in her ear when she bids. Jaime feels a bit like a Kingsguard again, only with less having to stab tyrants in the back with his sword. The day _is_ young, though, and what a happy coincidence that there is a ready Targaryen nearby.

Jaime does not have to wonder at his Lady’s guess. It would be obvious for anybody that _didn’t_ have war and conquest brained into them by Tywin Lannister.

“No,” Jaime says, looking around and shaking his head. “I overheard some of the men that went south with his Grace. The dead have already made it south of the wall. Somehow. They aren’t sure how yet. And we’ve lost contact with Eastwatch-by-the-Sea.”

As grim as this news is, it does not seem to surprise Lady Sansa.

“So we have even less time than we anticipated,” Sansa surmises.

Even from where they are, up on the ramparts, they can see the tent-city that has sprung up around Winterfell’s four gates as far as the horizon in any direction, all the way to Winter Town. Jaime nods his head. “We have even less time than we anticipated.”

Lady Sansa stills at that, and so does Jaime— maybe from the reality of the situation settling down over them like a fog. Perhaps they simply get lulled into silence by the sounds of a Keep already busy with the day, the kitchens busy preparing food for too many people and the stables caring for too many horses and the blacksmiths molding metal for too many soldiers. This oddly suits Jaime better than the Red Keep once had: King’s Landing had smelled too foul and had too much of the politics of the Small Council’s Game going on to be truly pleasant. People come in and out of Winterfell as they watch and the Northern Lords all give little bows in their direction whenever they spot Lady Sansa’s head of molten hair. Jaime spots Lord Varys with his hands folded into his robes in an archway and gives a little wave with his golden hand to let him know that that he has, in fact, seen him watching.

And then Jaime turns back, towards his Lady, “How long are you planning on having your sister wear Littlefinger’s face?”

He and Littlefinger had never been close, as close as two people who served the same circles of the same council could be, he supposed, but Jaime had mostly stood outside Robert’s door as he fucked his way through the whorehouses of King’s Landing.

But, Jaime cannot deny— something about the self-important smugness that Arya Stark uses is nearly _unnatural_. He hadn’t believed it when Sansa had revealed it to him. It looked like it was the man himself.

He’s more impressed than anything.

“As long as she can.”

“You think that wise, my Lady?” Jaime asks. “From what I hear— Littlefinger’s trial was rather, well. Bloody. People talk about bloodshed.”

Lady Sansa pulls her furs further up around her collar and looks unconcerned at Jaime’s question, as earnestly as he is asking it: if yesterday’s first meeting went badly, he cannot even imagine how it will go if Daenerys Targaryen discovers one of the members of House Stark can change their face _at will_.

“The only people that saw what happened in the Great Hall were Maester Wolkan, Lord Royce and twelve of his most trusted Knights,” Sansa assures him. “The truth _will_ get out, eventually. Soon, if Lord Varys has half the reach he did in King’s Landing when I was a girl. But Arya is a piece I am not willing to reveal just yet,” she tells him, and the _damned_ Northern wind stirs curls of her red hair. “Just like you are, Ser Jaime.”

Being called a _piece_ but a girl half his age would have rankled him a year ago, Jaime knows. But it’s oddly— freeing? He was his father’s pawn for years, Robert’s dog for years, Cersei’s for years beyond counting.

At least Lady Sansa is upfront on issue of his status. He is a tool to use against the Conquerer. And he’s absolutely fine with that.

They walk further along the ramparts, more for movement against the cold than anything else. Lady Sansa does not take the arm he offers— his bad one— but they walk closely enough that a small pocket of space around them isn’t entirely frozen. Lady Sansa does not even look bothered by it. Looks like she was born for it.

He glances her way twice, in comfortable silence, before the curiosity wins out.

“Why did you?” he asks.

Lady Sansa gives him a look that reveals nothing, that maintains her ice exterior, but Jaime isn’t fooled.

He pushes. Kicks a crack right in the ice.

“There were a hundred other moves you could have made,” he pushes, taking in their surroundings. They are alone on the ramparts, but he lowers his voice to a whisper anyway. “You could have asked me to pretend to be a prisoner of House Stark. You could have _not_ pretended. I’ve been a prisoner of House Stark before, there are worse burdens to carry. You could have lied and said that I was simply sent ahead of the Lannister forces to help with the council meetings and planning our strategies. Evaded her wrath. I don’t have much experience fighting the dead, for true, but I know how to get armies to move together. _Anything_. Instead you tell them of Cersei’s betrayal and reveal my oath.”

Lady Sansa stops, turns away from him and peers back down into the courtyard. Servants bow as they pass, both on the ramparts and below them. Jaime follows her to the bannister.

She’s considering her answer. He knows the look well.

“Cersei was always going to betray us,” Lady Sansa finally gives him. Like it is a piece of information that has worth to her. “Always. I warned him that she was not an enemy to be overlooked. Her betrayal was not a truth I wanted to spend precious time protecting.”

She was. He should have known. Should have seen it coming. Looking back— it’s what always happened to those who went up against Cersei. Beyond what was expected of a Lannister, beyond the demands of _family_ and _duty_.

The Sept of Baelor is proof enough of that.

But Jaime Lannister is apparently a fool. “You foresaw a betrayal I did not, then,” Jaime gives her in return. “For once I thought I was going to be able to act honorably, only to be told that my oaths were once again worth less than the breath spent to give them.”

He sees Lady Sansa look at him out of the corner of his gaze but doesn’t turn into it. Perhaps it hits a little to close to his heart.

“You have acted honorably, Ser Jaime,” Lady Sansa tells him. “My sister and I were returned to Winterfell and both halves of Ice are now in House Stark’s possession. I told you, that day, that I hold that oath fulfilled.”

She had. Jaime remembers it well, Lady Sansa in the middle of an empty field of snow near the glass gardens. She’d regarded him as an enemy— as any wise Lady should have— and Jaime had first glimpsed what the Dragon Queen must have, yesterday. A creature of ice and steel and stone with eyes old beyond counting, yet something else, too. A crack. Until he’d knelt in the snow and laid Widow’s Wail at her feet and said the words that would bind him to House Stark for the rest of his life.

 _“I have but one condition, Ser Jaime_ ,” _she had told him that day. “In addition to those the oath laid down.”_

_Jaime had looked up, still knelt. “Name it, my Lady.”_

_“You rename that sword of yours. Widow’s Wail has no place in House Stark.”_

He has yet to rename the sword at his hip. Sword names are important. It takes planning, and _meaning_. _Oathkeeper_ had meaning, when he’d given it to Brienne. _Ice_ had meaning. The nameless sword at his hip has done nothing to earn a name. His son had done nothing with it, except torture Littlefinger’s whores.

“So,” Jaime huffs out. “The great Kingslayer, Oathbreaker, Man-Without-Honor. In love with a woman half his age, heir of House Stark, and Lady of Winterfell. This is the favor you ask of me— and I do intend on granting it. But I’ll have you know, my Lady, that I’ll probably lose a fight to the death for your honor. My left hand just isn’t the same as my right was.”

“There will be no need for fighting, Ser Jaime,” Lady Sansa says, with a tiny spark of a smile. “You are not the only piece I have yet to play.”

A commotion in the yard draws their attention: both he and Lady Sansa turn to see it. As if she has been summoned, Daenerys Targaryen, Proclaimed Queen of the Seven Kingdoms, Breaker of Chains, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, and more titles than Jaime has the presence of mind or fucks to scrounge up, has appeared with her entourage. She is easy to pick out in the mass of leather and furs that Lady Sansa had the foresight to offer them: she is the only one dressed in white.

“Well, well,” Jaime says, under his breath. He is cautious of eager ears nearby but they are the only people in either direction on the ramparts for fifteen feet. “She has arisen to make her first appearance after her bumble. I wonder who’ll be burning today. It will probably be me, if we’re being honest about it.”

“You speak as though you were not the main architect of that fiasco, Ser Jaime.” Lady Sansa tells him.

He knows he threw wildfire onto a pyre, but he’d seen an opportunity to shift the tide. It hadn’t gone _exactly_ as he had planned, and honestly if the dragons had been here he would have been a very handsome oily stain in Winterfell’s courtyard, but it’d worked out, hadn’t it?

All of the North saw first hand what this Last Targaryen’s temper was capable of. Targaryens were good for conquering. Not so good for ruling.

He’s spent too long in a court, playing the Game.

But even up from the ramparts, they can see that she has worn a different mask today: yesterday she was a regal, battle-hardened queen, greeting subjects that were fortunate enough to welcome her presence. Today she is a humble, blessed ruler, looking after the needs of the regular soldiers. The Northmen and the Wildlings are cold and unyielding, as they always have been. They are too far away to see if their cold reception is chipping away at the Dragon Queen’s mask. Her advisors should perhaps inform their Queen to fix the issue that is on everyone’s mind: the lack of food and the threat of dragons, before she tries to win love and loyalty.

“She is no Margaery Tyrell,” Jaime says. “But either she knows how to play the Game or her advisors have pulled her to heel.”

Jaime has seen too much of a Targaryen on the Iron Throne to comment: seen how Aerys’ court cowered in fear of the fire and the madness. Perhaps Rhaegar might have been a better king than his father, had he lived— most people had believed he would be, had decided to just wait until Aerys’ madness drove him to try and drink wildfire like Aerion Targaryen had. But the silver-haired fuck had to go get his chest caved in by Robert Baratheon’s hammer at the Battle of the Trident. And Robert had been many things— drunkard, whoremonger, warmonger, wastrel, but at least he had been a vast improvement.

No. Jaime had stood on the road from the Reach to King’s Landing as the Dothraki Screamers bared down upon them only to look up to the horizon and see a dragon bigger than any Greyjoy ship blocking out the sun.

Stared her down as he rode on his white Desertier, pointing the spear as best he could with his bad hand, thinking that he might end it, he might save all those people in King’s Landing twice over if he could just get a bit of luck, just this once—

It hadn’t worked. Obviously. And four months later here he stands. Looking down into a courtyard, at this new Targaryen as she tours the grounds and he sees nothing that hints that she might be different. Targaryens are Targaryens. Three hundred years of inbreeding has seen to that.

_Every time a Targaryen is born, the gods flip a coin._

“I almost admire her,” Lady Sansa admits. It’s the highest praise Jaime has ever heard her give in the month that he’s been in Winterfell, serving at her side.

But it’s dimmed with calculation, too, and heavy with something more than just Ned Stark’s bearing.

“Do you?” Jaime wonders, leaning his gold hand against the bannister and resting his arm for a moment. The gold filigree is heavier than it looks. Sometimes he wishes he could take it off and just be left with the stump.

And then, from Sansa, “Like I admired Cersei Lannister.”

And if nothing else chills his skin, not even the northern wind, it is this. This and the look on Lady Sansa’s face. It is not the armor or the mask but something raw and calculating and cavernous and _empty_ , too, held together by a beautiful face and blue eyes that hide a stormy sea. It speaks of pain, the kind of pain that old soldiers hide. Jaime does not even think Lady Sansa knows she’s showing it.

“She’ll try to get rid of you, you know,” he tells Lady Sansa, suddenly. That off expression clears, though it lingers somewhere in the crease on her brow. “Once this is done. Send you on some far-off quest to garner more support. Marry you off to some Lord on the other end of Westeros. Anything but keep you in the North.”

Lady Sansa says nothing, but sends him a quick look.

Jaime knows that look.

“Oh, he didn’t,” Jaime begs. Maybe as a last hope. _Of course he did_ , Jaime thinks. _Hasn’t been here a full day and already causing trouble_. He’d forgotten, for just a moment, that the Lady at his side had once been his sister-in-law. “Convenient.”

“Very convenient,” Sansa agrees. “ _Someone_ must have mentioned it to her as we broke our fasts this morning. It would be a smart move. By their logic I am the heir to three of the seven kingdoms she claims the right by birth to. The North, the Riverlands, and the Vale. I was also conveniently once married to her Hand. It did not take a Master of the Game to predict it.”

Jaime cannot say whether his brother was the instigator of this plan: as far as he remembers, his brother had valiantly refused his marriage rites. Though now, as Lady of Winterfell, any half-sane man would jump at the opportunity to exchange wedding vows in a Sept.

Jaime asks, though he already knows the answer, “And your response to this suggestion?”

“The _King in the North_ answered in my stead,” the Lady tells him.

This is _not_ the answer Jaime was expecting. “And?”

Lady Sansa breathes deeply, almost as if she is trying to calm a burst of her own temper. To Jaime, she looks as calm and collected as ever. “He refused it. Refused to even _speak_ of marriage, before the War for the Dawn was won.” And then his Lady turns to him and says, lower _._ “In _any_ capacity.”

Again. Jaime is not a Master of the Game. Wouldn’t take one, either.

“Ah. She has her sights on Ned Stark’s bastard-turned-King,” Jaime guesses.

As if Jaime’s words have summoned the Maybe-King-In-The-North, Jon Snow appears in the courtyard as well. The Dragon Queen notices immediately, though Lady Sansa doesn’t seem to.

“It would be a powerful match,” Sansa says, but she sounds wrong again, somehow, far-off and distant, _lost_. “House Stark is one of the few Great Houses with anything left to them. The Freys were all murdered over their stew. The Tyrells are dead. The Martells are _dead_ , or infighting in civil war. The Baratheons killed one another to the very last man, or died fighting the Boltons. The Greyjoys are alive but bitterly divided in two. The Tullys, as you well know, are all but gone.”

He does. Edmure Tully is the last Tully left, and the last he’d heard, he was still captive by Lannister forces. Because of _him_. He hadn’t had the foresight to release him on his way North.

“The Lannisters, too,” Jaime offers, because he can tell by the way she glances at him that she wants to include his House in this utter destruction but doesn’t want to cause him pain.

Because they both know yet _another_ secret that he shared the day he’d knelt before her.

“Yes,” Lady Sansa allows. He might imagine it, but he thinks he feels a touch on his good arm, of comfort. “The Lannisters, too. It is the only match she _could_ make, if she wants to cement her claim with a marriage to a Great House.”

“A Stark marrying a Targaryen,” Jaime wonders. “Here I thought the living dead were the strangest things I’d ever live to see.”

Even as the words come out of his mouth, his eyes once again catch on the dark figure as he moves in the courtyard. Jaime, for a brief, brilliant moment, has an idea.

Without saying anything, he reaches over to where Sansa rests her thin fingers on the wooden railing.

“What are you doing, Ser Jaime?” Sansa asks, looking down at where he holds her smaller hand with his remaining good one.

“Fulfilling my oath,” Jaime tells her. “Playing my part. Surely it hasn’t been that long since you dreamed about knights in golden armor. You did ask me for my favor, did you not?”

Lady Sansa studies him, but grants her permission with a small dip of her head. He pulls her away from the railing so that she faces him entirely, instead of shoulder to shoulder as they were before.

“Now,” Jaime tells her. “Look at me, Lady Sansa. Like the world could fall away in the next fifteen seconds and you wouldn’t notice, so enraptured you are with my gaze.”

She looks at him, blank, reserved, cold— like _ice_ , but also not, because she has the look of one who is merely tolerating a scheme and not fully participating. Jaime glances once more down into the courtyard.

“Come, my Lady,” Jaime says. “Remember that I saw the way you used to look at Loras Tyrell, and this is not it.”

That does it. Something flickers and suddenly things _shift_ , in Lady Sansa.

Wonders how many masks this young wolf possesses, that she can be the Lady of Winterfell one moment and Sansa Stark the next, a decade younger and without half the torment that she has endured. Oh, and _everything_ changes, too, the light in her eye and her posture and the nervous shaking in her fingers, the tremble in her lips. If he hadn't been watching it happen before him, Jaime isn't quite sure he'd believe it. 

Jaime must give her credit: she is a spectacular actress.

“Look away, bashfully, like my words are affecting you. Like I’ve just whispered something sweet in your ear.”

She does, and even Jaime is nearly pulled under.

“Now, my Lady,” Jaime whispers against her ear. “What I am about to ask you is not honorable, not in the least sense,” he says. But still, “And yet sometimes it is honorable to do a dishonorable thing. Will you give me your trust, Sansa?”

Eyes still closed, Sansa’s brow furrows. Under her breath, she tells him, “I would not have accepted your oath did I not, Ser Jaime.”

“Hush,” he says, his eyes on the archway on this side of the courtyard, now, at the figure as Jaime moves cautiously and places his hands against his Lady’s shoulders, above the fur, because even if this is an act he is a Knight, and a Knight is always a gentleman when it comes to serving maidens. “Let me at least fulfill _this_ oath.”

His hands move upwards, under the curtain of her hair. At the first touch of his good hand and his bad he winces— Lady Sansa’s skin is like ice.

But her eyes are closed and he can see the flakes of snow in her lashes. And like any good Knight, Jaime runs his good thumb across the pink of her cheek, their faces inches apart, at best, and his eyes keep flicking to the movement below them as he lifts her chin—

A noise from just below them breaks the spell that Jaime has woven.

Sansa freezes under Jaime’s fingers, good and bad. She had clearly not expected anyone else to be paying attention when all the commotion was towards the stables and the kitchens hadn’t seen the King in the North detach himself from the Dragon Queen’s entourage and coming the way that Jaime had, minutes ago. Her eyes snap back open and immediately find Jaime’s— searching, before she turns from Jaime’s fingers. Jaime knows very well what this looks like. Lady Sansa is a good actress, yes, but Jaime is _better_. And he’d watched Jon Snow trudge across the courtyard, having spotted them as he spoke to the Dragon Queen’s retinue.

 _Lord_ Snow stands stuck even as they look down upon him, _stuck_ , stuck like a wolf pup in brambles, right in the middle of the lane like he had been a moth attracted to flame, mouth gaping open.

This looks like the former King in the North just interrupted a moment between the Lady of Winterfell and her Sworn Shield. A moment that should not have been interrupted.

Jaime makes a great deal of looking from Lady Sansa to Jon, and back again. They do nothing but stare at one another.

He apparently must do _everything_.

“If you’ll pardon me, Lady Sansa,” Jaime says, and turns, like it pains him to pull himself away like some love-struck Knight from the songs, and bows while he presses a kiss to the back of her hand just before he leaves.

 

_________

 

“What are you doing,” Brienne demands. Jaime jumps, looking guilty. “You are supposed to be attending to Lady Sansa.”

Brienne nearly pushes him out of the darkened hallway in which he hides, but Jaime immediately begins to gesture, and hold a finger to his lips as he peers around the corner. Brienne blinks, slowly, confused as to how everything that preparing for this war is has also somehow led to _this._ But she peers, too, because the curiosity wins out eventually.

All she sees is King Jon in a courtyard, staring up at the ramparts at nothing. Clenching and unclenching his gloved fists.

When he leaves, Ser Jaime exhales at last, and turns. And then— _flounders_ , which Ser Jaime never does. “It isn’t what it looks like,” he begins.

She offers him only a blank stare, before, “I’m aware.”

And yet Ser Jamie seems earnest with it as she turns to march past him— if Ser Jaime isn’t with Lady Sansa, that means Brienne must be, so she has a duty to fulfill. “I mean it, Lady Brienne. It isn’t what it looks like.” He peers around, perhaps looking for others in this hall, but there are none. She does not even muster up the _I am no Lady, Kingslayer_. “I’m… fulfilling an oath.”

She offers him another blank look. “I am aware, Ser Jaime. I would never gainsay your loyalty to Lady Sansa, nor compromise our Lady’s honor.”

He looks oddly pleased. “You have that much faith in me?”

Brienne is not phased in the slightest. She scoffs, “No, I have more faith in Lady Sansa’s understanding of _men_.”

 

_________

 

The outsiders trickle in over the next few days, but the Dragon Queen’s horde does not arrive. A girl who is Arya Stark slips off Littlefinger’s mask, when she can— he was known for spending long hours attending to his _business_ in his rooms— and walks freely among them with spare faces that she stole from the House of Black and White. They Dragon Queen’s people aren’t careful, either. The only barrier that truly remains is language: Arya Stark, no matter what face she wears, does not speak Dothraki or the dialect of Essosi that the Unsullied speak, or the half-dozen Low Valyrian that some of the former slaves of Slaver’s Bay speak.

But Arya Stark has learned the Game of Faces, not just with words but with _people_ , with looks and hesitation and body language. And she learns fast.

She finds a bitterly divided force, despite all of the goodwill that Sansa and Jon have been giving. Even in the tent cities, Northmen do not interact with Dothraki and Unsullied do not eat with Wildlings. And everywhere she goes, the North has not forgotten what the _last_ Targaryen brought to them.

 

_________

 

On the fourth evening, Sansa does her rounds unbothered. Ser Jaime and Brienne have traded off attending to her. Feasts are served once again but are a much more intimate affair, with people meandering in and out as it pleases them. Sansa does not even take her seat at the right end of the main table, too busy doing as she has done for the past three months: ensuring that Winterfell and House Stark do not fall to illness and starvation after all they have endured. Rumors have quickly spread of Ser Jaime’s _display_ on the ramparts, and Sansa wishes she had the spare strength to be angry with him: had it not been exactly what she had planned herself. Jaime was fulfilling the favor she had asked of him. Perhaps not in the way she would have done it.

A Sworn Shield in love with his own Lady. Northerners, as sour as they were, loved the old tales.

And it would halt whatever budding plan the Dragon Queen had with Tyrion to place another Lannister cloak on her shoulders. Why would she try to convince the Lady of Winterfell to accept the _Imp_ when she could have the _Kingslayer_? Let them think that way. _Let them_.

No. She would die in a Stark cloak.

She passes through the Great Hall as the feasts are in motion, smiles and regally greets those that notice. Steadfastly keeps her head high as those at the high table call out their own greetings.

Leaves, when Jon is not there, and comes back around again once the hall has been cleared for the night of even the most stubborn men.

It is late. Only a handful of hours remain until the sun begins to rise.

She is tired. But the Lady of Winterfell’s duties do not end. Sometimes, late at night when what remains of Sansa Stark has crawled out of this armor that has become her skin, she wonders how her Lady Mother managed it for so many years with five tiny children.

Sansa herself begins to extinguish what candles remain, though a serving maid would be up in a few hours to do it. She does not mind the busy work.

It just delays when she and Ghost will return to the Lord’s chambers and her worries will keep her lying awake under her furs, unable to sleep. Worries about everything: grain stores, wood for their fires, the meat that they are steadily working through faster than their hunters can go out to the Wolfswood and catch anything more than a few rabbits. Worries about the future, should they survive it. Worries about  _her_ future. 

Worries about Jon. Yet Jon has been absent from the feasts— for two days at her last count— not that Sansa has spent enough time in them herself to discover why.

Sansa is dousing the last of the candles when she hears the sound of Brienne leaning against the wall. She’d been so deep in her own thoughts that she has nearly forgotten that her Sworn Shield hasn’t left her side.

“You may rest now, Brienne,” Sansa tells her, voice carrying in the late stillness. “I will be retiring myself soon. Ghost will come and find me.”

“I thank you, my Lady,” Brienne’s voice comes. “But I will stay, should you permit it.”

Sansa knows Brienne and Jaime have spent the last four days trading off their shifts at her side. She knows that she is keeping them apart, like the moon follows the sun across the sky and to the horizon.

But somewhere inside her— inside _Sansa_ , she is thankful for it. Their presences are like Ghost. Softly, while she douses another candle, “I permit it.”

“Forgive me, my lady,” a voice speaks. Sansa’s instinct is to _flinch_ , to jump, but she is in Winterfell and she is strongest here so the cold mask of ice slides down from the crown of her head to the worn soles of her feet. Brienne is off the wall and at her side as the figure steps out of the shadows of the Great Hall. “It was not my intention to frighten you.”

Brienne is still ready to draw Oathkeeper, standing at the ready. Sansa has never felt more indebted to her. But she recognizes the figure.

“Lord Varys,” Sansa says. Floundering, _floundering_. Four days and she’s already floundering. Her surprise has knocked her off-kilter. “You’ve risen early. I trust there’s no problem?”

It comes out perhaps higher than she intends, but her voice does not break, nor does she sound panicked to her own ears. Given how fast her heart is beating, it is a small miracle.

“No, my Lady,” Lord Varys allows. “There is no problem,” he tells her, and then the brows on his round face rise towards his non-existent hairline. “I have always been an early riser. The best secrets are to be had in the early mornings and the late nights.”

Not for the first time, Sansa feels ill at ease.

Lord Varys is a great player of the Game— Perhaps better than Littlefinger ever was.

If it were Tyrion she could play the part of Sansa Stark, the little dove that had endured King’s Landing. The fragile, grieving wife that he had wanted to protect. But Sansa does not think that Lord Varys would be fooled by that mask.

No. The Lady of Winterfell will have to do. 

She also does believe that he has sought her out by mere happenstance. “I’m afraid that it is late even for my schedule, my Lord. But a Lady’s work is never done.”

“Indeed, my Lady.”

Sansa remembers exchanges like these: when words meant nothing, pretty things with no worth that were said just for the sake of being said. It still feels like she is searching for an enemy she cannot see.

What’s more, Sansa’s urge to turn and look for Arya is nearly overwhelming, but one crack in her armor will shatter the rest, so she resists it. All the while, she remembers Bran’s warning in the Godswood: _stay out of the Spider’s reach_. Prays that Arya is off somewhere else in Winterfell, or asleep in her bed, or whatever it is that a Faceless Man does in the early hours of the day. But Sansa stands, proper, ever the Northern Lady, ever Catelyn-Come-Again, ever Ned Stark’s daughter, safe in her own home.

If she sows enough seeds into this armor of ice, eventually it will gleam.

“I trust all of her Grace’s party have settled well,” Sansa begins. “I apologize for our lack of suitable rooms, my Lord. We are still rebuilding much of the Main Keep.”

A truth: but also a lie. The Lady that Catelyn Stark had raised would have ensured that such important guests were given the most lavish rooms Winterfell had to offer. But Sansa Stark has long grown from being her mother’s cherished child. She is Ned Stark’s child, too, Robb’s sister and Bran’s sister and Arya’s sister and Rickon’s sister and _Jon_ ’s sister, too. They already had a full keep before the Dragon Queen arrived. Already have more refugees than they know what to do with. They are short on _everything_ , because of Ramsay. They have no furs for more clothes, no leather to cover breastplates, no firewood for more fires.

And the tent-city that has spread from here to Winter Town will freeze once the real snow comes. There have been winters past that have buried Winterfell’s highest tower under the snowfall.

But this is a question that the Lady of Winterfell would be expected to ask: she has not sat next to the Dragon Queen during the few meals Sansa’s actually attended, or been invited to her private councils.

She’s barely spoken to her, this Targaryen.

“We have certainly traveled through worse, my Lady,” Lord Varys intones. “The Queen is most grateful for your hospitality and House Stark’s generosity.”

A well-practiced answer. The answer that one would give to the question she asked.

A silence stretches.

 _Stay out of the Spider’s reach_.

Had the warning been for both of them? Sansa doesn’t know. Something is _off_ , somehow, and she wishes with all she has that Ghost would come padding through the door just behind them.

“I am glad of it,” Sansa tries. “Now, if you will pardon me, Lord Varys. It is late, and I am weary from a long day. Brienne?”

Brienne does not waste a moment, she is at Sansa’s side and ready to escort her Lady to safety.

“You’ve grown into a great beauty, my Lady,” Varys adds at the very last moment, as Sansa is nearly to the side door that leads upstairs into the Great Keep. His voice rises with every word. “I only had the fortune to meet your late Lady Mother once or twice, the last time only a year before her regrettable end. But you are more beautiful than she ever was.”

Sansa cannot remember Lady Catelyn. Remembers the shade of her hair, though the memory of it fades more every day. Remembers her voice, she thinks. Remembers the way that she used to stand.

No, Sansa loses a detail every morning that she can muster looking into a looking glass. Every day one of her features replaces her Lady Mother’s.

Still, Sansa stops. Stops as her furs rustle around her feet, her skirts heavy. Brienne does, too. Follows her Lady’s lead. Sansa stops as something shifts, _something_. Something off, her chest stinging from the hook he’s using to gain her attention. She gives it to him, she turns and looks towards Lord Varys. He stands alone in the Great Hall, in the moon’s light, with the sleeves of his robes crossed. A spider in a wolf’s den.

Sansa stops, turns, _hesitates_ , because something has occurred to her. Some plan to put this spider in her path. Moves on a board she cannot see. _Sometimes to understand a person’s motives, I play a little game_.

And soft, it is so soft, “Beauty is worthless.”

He looks at her appraisingly. This answer has pleased him. “And yet men die for it.”

“Yes,” Sansa agrees. Says it like it costs something to breathe life into it. “Men fight and they die for it. They also like to _ruin_ it.”

If the world could but see her scars they would cower: but they cannot. Sansa ensures they cannot. Her furs hide everything beneath her chin. Would they cower from her like they did the Hound with his half-burned face?

If they could see all the marks marring the beauty, tainting her skin like a half-eaten peach, would they call her beautiful?

“Beauty cannot stop a war,” she continues. She gathers herself, and her furs, and her skirts, the Lady of Winterfell, and lets more of the ice show with every step she takes towards the Spider. “Beauty cannot feed an army, beauty cannot rebuild walls. Beauty cannot lessen the pain of a dying man— as much as he would swear it did. Beauty cannot dry tears. Beauty cannot fend off the northern cold. If Ramsay Bolton had not needed my face for his claim to the North he would have destroyed that too, like everything else. And then I would have been the Ruined Wolf.”

No. Beauty, like most masks, has its uses. Sansa has learned the value of it now. If she had not been a Northern Rose she would not have been betrothed to Joffrey or coveted by Petyr.

“You have the look of your mother, Lady Stark,” Lord Varys intones, bowing his head like he has bestowed wisdom upon her. “But I see that you are every inch the seed of Ned Stark.”

The mere mention of Eddard Stark is enough to drum up things that Sansa has forgotten— anger, mostly anger, and a trauma so far gone that others have carved over the old scars.

The storm builds and builds and _builds_ and as hard as Sansa tries to be steel and snow and ice and the Lady of Winterfell, Catelyn-Come-Again, Ned Stark’s daughter—something inside her is snapping her teeth like Ghost.

Perhaps this is how a wolf reacts when backed into a corner. Trapped in a web.

 _Fight every battle_ , comes Littlefinger’s voice. _Everywhere, always, in your mind_.

“Lord Varys,” Sansa starts. “Have you forgotten what role you played in my father’s death?”

It is obvious that her words are not what he expects, alone with this Lady of Winterfell at the early hours of the morning. Perhaps his little birds have been whispering to him, perhaps Sansa was right, and the whispers of Littlefinger’s death have already escaped. It is the only thing that would explain the flash of fear that crosses over his features.

Does he know that he is standing mere feet away from where Arya sliced his throat from ear to ear? Feet away from where the Valyrian dagger cut him to the bone, like they had cut Catelyn Stark?

“I remember it well, Lord Varys,” Sansa continues. She is suddenly glad that Arya is not here, because she may be wearing Littlefinger’s face but Sansa knows that Arya is still _inside_ that face, and Arya remembers Lord Varys too. And even Sansa might not be able to stop her. “Your task was to frighten a small girl no older than thirteen into helping stay a Northern rebellion to protect her father. Your task was to make Cersei seem like a sweet, concerned motherly figure so that sweet child would fall unwitting into her open arms. Your _task_ , my Lord, was to condemn an innocent man to death and begin the very war you were attempting to stop.”

 _She is a sweet thing now_ , Grand Maester Pycelle had once said. _But in ten years? See what treasons she may hatch._

Lord Varys does not wear a mask like other players of the Game do, so she sees how the memory must play in his own mind.

Something like fear. Something like when Ramsay Bolton had realized that his hounds were about to eat him. _Of course they will. You said it yourself: you haven’t fed them in seven days_.

There is the knowledge inside Sansa, somehow, some cruel tendril planted by Baelish or Bolton or Joffrey, that she could have Brienne seize this man. Seize him and charge him for his crimes against House Stark, just like they had with Baelish. She could end this alliance between Stark and Targaryen right now. Ruin all of Jon’s kneeling.

And that is enough: it is enough to silence that same snapping, growling thing.

The look on Jon’s face when she’d seen him on the ramparts with Jaime. And in the Godswood, too. Like he did not recognize her, or perhaps did not want to.

It is an awful, falling feeling that Sansa does not like.

And the years of cruelty have not made her cruel. Perhaps not soft, not kind. Not weak. Not a Winter Rose in a field of thorns. Something broken and bruised and cold,  _too cold_ , too much armor and too much ice, too much of the North in her, even when they'd once said that a beauty like her would freeze in the south. No. She is not soft.

But not cruel.

“I have not sought you out to mix sharp tongues, Lady Sansa,” Varys tells her. He straightens perceptibly and seems to pull himself back into his own self. “I am aware of what the strain of hosting an entire army not your own must be, especially now in the throes of winter. No— I come bearing a gift.”

A servant that had blended too well into the shadow for Sansa to spot comes forward at Lord Varys’ gesture, bringing forth a worn wooden box. Brienne, behind her, moves in her loud armor, which echoes in the quiet hall.

Sansa stays her with a simple gesture nearly hidden beneath her furs.

Lord Varys takes it from the boy’s hands and places it on one of the long tables that they stand between. Opens the clasp.

“Your eldest brother was not wearing it when he died, but it was taken by some— forgive me— rather unmentionable characters. While I was still serving the Realm in King’s Landing I sent forth my little birds to retrieve it. I am aware of the role I played in Ned Stark’s death, my Lady. But to my only truths that I hold, I was doing it not in the hope that he died, but that he was sent North, to his family. I hope that this will put you at ease, at least in some part.”

Sansa’s breath has been stolen. Try as she might, the armor cracks as her hands tremble as she reaches out— reaches out for the object that Lord Varys holds in his fingers.

Robb’s crown. The Crown of Winter. The Crown of the Northern Kings.

Her breath is gone as she takes it, feels the weight in her hands. Feels almost too acutely how heavy it must have sat on Robb’s head, and for a moment she can see him clearly— sitting on the Iron Throne with this heavy piece of iron atop his head, a trickle of blood falling from where the rough points must cut into the skin. Sees it so clearly it as if she is standing back in King’s Landing, all over again, weeping as Joffrey pointed a crossbow at her chest to punish her for Robb’s crimes against the crown. And then, equally as clearly, sees herself standing next to Robb. Not a prisoner of the Red Keep. Not a little dove or a fragile wife or the Key to the North. But a wolf.

She is a wolf in Winterfell. She is strongest here.

He would have been a good King. He had a fair judgement, and a better mind. It was his heart that led him astray.

And yet— and yet something begins to churn, like a storm on the sea, somewhere deep within her chest. Something _rank_ and rotten. Something else.

It does not take a Master of the Game to understand what this is: if this is indeed Robb’s crown and not a cruel replica, for she has never seen the original, this is the crown of House Stark’s ancestral seat. And as the oldest living trueborn Stark… this crown by right should sit on her head.

 _Hers_. Not Jon’s. Jon is the King in the North, but he is not trueborn. He is a bastard, even if he has been chosen by his people.

And Rickon is dead. Bran— Bran has become something _other_. Arya a Faceless Man, capable of changing her appearance at will and disappearing into shadow.

No. Sansa is the last Stark that could claim the Northern Crown. Sansa is Robb’s heir.

But instead of being filled with awe at the feel of it, at this _moment_ , the first connection she has felt to Robb in more than three years— all she can feel is that same storm again.

At the _audacity_. At the inelegance of this test of loyalty.

 _Would you take Jon’s crown if it were offered_ , they are asking. _Could you, if you wished it_?

Could she _take_ his crown. Take it? She’d been offered it three times. _Three_. Freely offered. The Northern Lords would have stripped Jon of his crown even as he was fighting to save all of their lives from the White Walkers. And it had been _Sansa_ that had kept it for him, safeguarded it for him, soothed their worries and kept them working together towards the same goal and kept the newly victorious House Stark from crumbling just like all of the other Great Houses in Westeros. As a girl she had dreamt of being a Queen, of marrying a southron prince and having his babes grow in her belly, of being so beautiful that Knights would ride in tourneys for her favor and having a half dozen not-as-beautiful ladies to attend to her every whim. That girl is so far away that Sansa can barely feel her.

She had just been a stupid girl. A stupid girl, with stupid dreams, who spent her life cowering in fear from one abuser to the next to step forward. From Joffrey to Cersei to Lysa to Littlefinger to _Bolton_.

 _No_ — something, some voice inside her mind seems to think. _Sansa Stark survived_.

It is a task to let the distain show, to look back up from the crown to Lord Varys and not show every inch of the wolf that she is. She is taller than he is, now. In King’s Landing he had been almost as tall as Littlefinger. As Father.

The storm that is breaking somewhere inside Sansa’s chest is shoved away, smothered, shoved down as best as she is able and the ice returns, crawling down her skin like Greyscale.

Her fingers stop trembling where she touches the iron crown, daintily, in her fingers, like she was about to crown some kneeling figure, some Knight, in the soft moonlight coming through the Great Keep’s windows.

Or perhaps about to lift the crown and place it on her own head.

“I thank you for this gift, Lord Varys,” Sansa allows, after a year, after a decade it seems, of feeling the weight of the iron points between her fingers. She barely looks up to where Lord Varys has been watching this entire time, watching for a crack. “But this is the Crown of the Northern Kings. It belongs to the King that lost his head for it.”

 

_________

 

He hears of it, the commotion, in the morning as he and Davos go over the grain stores _again_ and find them impeccably looked after, not a missing shipment in sight. The other Northern Keeps have even been sending regular shipments of grain to their stores, bolstering them for the Winter. It is an impressive feat. He was only Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch for a year, yet he remembers how many late nights he had to spend pouring over their grain and meat reserves so that they might survive a little while longer.

But he hears the servants begin to whisper their Lady’s name and it catches his ear. Distracts him from Ser Davos, against his wishes.

 _No_ , he doesn’t, he doesn’t want to even think about it.

He’s steadfastly ignored it, helped by the fact that the Lady of Winterfell has been curiously absent from feasts the last few days. She does not carry an invitation to Daenerys’ councils as he does, and their planning often lasts all day and into the night.

Or perhaps that is an excuse, Jon knows. An excuse for his cowardice. An excuse for the way that Jon’s feet seem to take him to the door of the solar in the Lord’s Chambers— _Sansa’s chambers_ — at night before he realizes that he is neither welcome nor brave enough to face his sister just yet.

But Sansa does not appear when they break their fasts early, very early, before the rest of the Keep and the Dragon Queen’s retinue arise.

Bran and Sam eat quietly to his right, hushed whispers passing between them. Jon’s spine straightens when Littlefinger strides in— _no_ , _not Littlefinger, Arya_ — and he feels it bubbling up again, that fear from the Godswood.

But Littlefinger takes the seat on his right, and after a tense moment of silence, Jon asks, “Where is my Lady Sister, my Lord?”

Arya is— Arya is _good_. She is too good. And if he had not seen her pull off Littlefinger’s face with his own eyes he’d swear it had been a dream. Jon had only had to suffer his presence for two moons, yet she has the very air around him down to the smallest detail.

“Well,” Not-Littlefinger says. “That would depend, your Grace. To which Stark sister do you refer?”

Oddly enough the urge to kick Arya beneath the table is nearly too strong to resist. “You _know_ which one, my Lord.”

And there it is: a flicker. Something Jon recognizes of his youngest sister. Not-Littlefinger lowers his voice. “With Robb.”

He does not wait. Jon stands and abandons his breakfast and is out of the Great Hall before anyone can catch him for yet another one of his daily responsibilities. As if his legs no longer obey his commands, his feet are carrying him where he suspects she might be, if those whispers have any truth to them.

Jaime Lannister loiters around the entrance to the crypts as Jon approaches, looking unbothered by the Northern cold. It is here that Jon falters, nearly turns around before he’s spotted, walks right back to his meeting with Davos or the council with Daenerys, anything other than face the Kingslayer.

But it is too late: he _has_ been noticed. And he is— _was_ — the King in the North. He cannot be seen cowering from a Lion.

He hadn’t cowered before him the _first_ time he’d come to Winterfell, years ago, when he was the bastard boy of Ned Stark. He won’t cower now, in front of the Sworn Shield of his own sister.

“Your Grace,” Lannister mocks, giving a little bow.

Jon bites down the urge to grab him by the throat. “Should you not be at your Lady’s side?”

The Kingslayer simply shrugs his shoulders. “My gracious Lady says that the Stark Crypts are for the Starks.”

 _The Stark crypts are for the Starks_. Jon can near Father’s voice saying that, from years ago, as he descends into the dark. There are just a few torches lit, just the ones nearest Father’s statue. The Crypts of Winterfell go on for almost half a mile, there are so many Kings and Lords buried down here. But Jon does not have eyes for the dead Kings of Winter: he follows the trail of lit torches and candles and almost immediately and against his will— his eyes go to his sister.

She is beautiful, in this hall of dead things. The only thing alive apart from him, yet she has her back to him, still as a statue.

Ghost waits patiently at her feet, like Lady once had.

Jon should not be surprised, he knows that Ghost has not left her side in months, since he went south. He’d been the one to order it: _look after her for me_.

Ghost flicks his ears as Jon approaches. Sansa idly skims her fingers over the fur atop his head.

That is the only sign that either of them have noticed his presence. If she hears him, she does not let it show.

Jon’s steps echo on the stone and his cloak rustles the dust and his armor— the armor of the King in the North— is hardly quiet. But as he gets closer he finds he cannot inhale fully, suddenly cannot get the way that the Kingslayer had looked, on the ramparts, out of his mind. Remembers that he has avoided her for days, this sister. Remembers the way that something inside his chest had tripped, stumbled, frozen at the sight of the pair. Remembers the way she had stared at him, _stared_ , as the Kingslayer had bowed and pressed a kiss to her hand before he departed. Remembers the way that she had looked down at him, _red and severe and beautiful_ and every word Jon could think of had simply departed from him.

Remembers the words that he had said in the Godswood and adds yet another mistake to his list. Remembers that he has made her a guest in her own castle with a Dragon Queen that would burn them alive given the smallest opportunity unless he can find a way to stop her.

Remembers the way that she had looked in the Kingslayer’s arms.

Real. The Sansa that Jon knows. Soft and unsure and _kind_ , and clever, too. The one that had coughed at the rough ale and had made him smile for the first time in weeks. Months.

 _Years_.

The statue before him is a stranger.

He stands abreast with her at last, his furs settling around his feet as he takes in the sight she is standing vigil to.

Robb. He has an iron sword laid out before him, as all Lords of Winterfell do.

And then Jon’s eyes catch on the iron crown that is too small to fit this statue, but Sansa has placed on Robb’s head anyway.

There is something heady about it. Something full of— loss. And grief. “The Crown of the Northern Kings.”

It echoes loudly in the crypts, even though he whispers it. But he cannot find it in him to wince, too caught up in the deceptive realism of the stone before them. It is _off_ , slightly. Sansa must have had this carved in his absence because Robb was not placed in the crypts when he had gone south. She must have slaved with the Stonemasons to give it a more than a passing resemblance to Robb.

The emptiness of the eyes, though— that is was breaks it. Robb’s eyes were like Sansa’s. Blue and a chasm that went on and on.

“A gift,” his sister says to the quiet. She does not speak to him, doesn’t even look his way, does not take her eyes off Robb’s statue or her hand from Ghost’s coat. “From her Grace.”

Jon doesn’t immediately register what his sister says, too caught up in Robb’s visage. But it does come to him eventually, in the quiet. _A gift from her Grace_.

“Sansa?”

 _Speak to me_ , he wants to say.  _We have to trust each other_.

But Sansa has no more words to give him, though Jon’s throat closes in on itself as he sees it all as it breaks across her face. Down in the crypts she must feel safe. Here she can be with the rest of the dead Starks.

Here she does not have to hide herself behind the armor like she does with him.

Ghost whines, from Sansa’s other side. She pets him like she had groomed her beloved Lady.

The silence blooms, otherwise. It is—uncomfortable, this silence. It grows pregnant and hangs heavy above Jon's head. He tries to open his mouth and think of some words to say but each and every time, they abandon him. 

Realizes that this is the first time that they’ve really been alone since his return. What happened in the Godswood didn't count— he’d _tried_ , he’d tried to speak with her, tried to explain it all, the reason that he swore their loyalty to the Dragon Queen. But now in the candle’s light it seems like the farthest thing from his mind. He just wants to stand here, in front of Robb, and _be_. Not _Lord Snow_. Not _Lord_ _Commander Snow_. Not the _King in the North_.

Just Jon.

Sansa's eyes do not leave Robb’s statue no matter where Jon tells his own eyes to look. He can’t help it. In the candle’s light she looks like she was made of liquid fire.

He doesn’t look at Robb’s statue now. Now, he has eyes only for his Lady Sister.

“Robb was undefeated on the battlefield,” Sansa says, quietly. “He had Tywin Lannister running from the Riverlands. I used to pray to all the Seven that he would meet the Lannisters on the field in King’s Landing and that Joffrey would be fool enough to ride out and meet him. That Robb would whet his sword in Joffrey’s blood and present it to me. A child’s dream,” she tells him, like it is some vast secret, and for a moment Jon feels it like a missing limb, this closeness that they had formed trying to retake Winterfell. The same closeness that has vanished since his return. It turns inside his chest just like his brother’s daggers did. Twists. “But Cersei would have never let her heir out onto the battlefield, even if Robb had made it all the way to the Crownlands. No. She kept all her little Lions close. And Joffrey was a coward.”

Sansa has not often spoken of King’s Landing. Not even when they were in their tents, not even in her solar after Bolton was dead— eaten by his own dogs, no less. Jon wants to say something, offer something. But he has no fond dreams of Robb left, either. Perhaps he’d left them in the dark, too.

Along with his goodness. With his sense of morality.

“The _King Who Lost the North_.”

She says it to the crypts, like the crypts would have an answer to offer them. But no. The silent air and still statues have nothing and Sansa’s eyes finally fall, like she can no longer bear to look at their brother. Instead her molten hair hangs in a heavy curtain and Jon is seized by the urge to hold her lest she come flying apart at the seams.

Jon even reaches out, reaches out just to catch on her sleeve, but it slips through his fingers like finely sifted sand.

He freezes _._ Remembers what that has done. What it has done for House Stark. The lies he has spun.

Jon looks up again, but Robb’s stone eyes have nothing but accusation in them, like he knows that he knelt to the Dragon Queen, and all of the _things_ that happened from Dragonstone to White Harbor. What’s worse, all of the things that have happened from the Wall to Winterfell. All of the thoughts that Jon cannot keep away, the _thing_ that seems to have come back with him from the darkness. The way that his heart seems to shred itself every time he looks over to find Sansa smiling at someone. Those smiles had once almost solely belonged to him. How three days ago he had been escorting Daenerys to the stables on some errand that he hadn’t been paying attention to and had _looked up_ and his whole self had tripped, stumbled, because of what he had seen, this golden Knight with his hand on Sansa’s cheek, Sansa looking thoroughly ready to be loved.

Even down here in the crypts Jon turns away, turns away from Robb’s statue, and Father’s, and his Aunt Lyanna’s, and Grandfather’s, like dead stone could see into him and see the _thing_ that he has carried since the Red Witch brought him back.

“Will that be what they remember him as?” She asks the crypts. “A thousand years from now, will Robb be the next Torrhen Stark, the King Who Knelt?”

“No,” Jon says. Turns to her, steps closer. “ _No_ , Sansa.”

They'll write down the real story of what happened to Robb. Of the betrayal of the Freys, of the bloody mess of the Red Wedding. Of— of how House Stark got their vengeance in the end. Jon still knows that in ten years, if any of them survive the next fortnight, that the remaining Freys will need to be dealt with, that they'll need to reach some sort of peace— but right at this very moment Jon wants nothing more than to assure Sansa that he'll fix things. He'll make it right. 

She nods her head, slightly, and pieces of the mask fall away. She looks back to Robb’s statue and the crown upon his head.

At some point Jon has begun drifting towards her like he is the tide and she the shore. He doesn't notice until he catches her scent in the still air: something crisp and sweet like new snow. Realizes that they are shoulder to shoulder, almost. Close enough that he could reach out and rest his fingers on her clasped hands.

It quiets again. Ghost rumbles, buffs, rubs his nose against Sansa’s hand in the most obvious grab for attention that Jon has ever seen his Direwolf make. Jon's been back for four days and not once has Ghost left Sansa's side. Not that he minds. At least one-half of his heart can come and go in her presence when he pleases without any of the guilt that accompanies it. But there are a hundred different things that the former King in the North and the Lady of Winterfell need to speak of, a hundred different things, but they do not. They let the silence fall and Jon resolutely avoids Robb’s stone eyes.

A hundred different things that Jon wants to say to _Sansa_ , too. Not as the roles they bear but as the first two Starks reunited. He wants to beg forgiveness. Wants to tell her of his dreams.

Knows he shouldn’t. His dreams come from the dark place, now. They should not stain the ears of his own sister.

But the temptation is there all the same.

“You were his favorite,” Sansa offers him. Breathes in. “Out of all of us.”

“Oh, aye,” Jon rumbles, his voice thick. “When he wasn’t beating me senseless with a training sword.”

This does not get him a laugh but it does get him a smile, a smile he’s missed so much it’s ripping him in two.

“I was better at swords than he was,” Jon offers in return. “And Theon was better with a bow, though you’d never get him to admit it,” he pauses. They are nearly close enough that he could move his fingers slightly and brush against her own. “But you were always the maiden when we played. You were his favorite.”

And then she, she looks— _looks_ , and seems to remember who she is talking to, who they are, and to Jon’s horror the smile falls and the ice begins to return. The  _Lady of Winterfell_ , who had greeted the Dragon Queen with veins full of winter.

 _No_ — he thinks. _Come back_.

Her back straightens and Jon sees it again, the stranger from last night, outside his door. “I wasn’t anyone’s favorite.”

That wasn’t true— Jon nearly stumbles over it. Sansa had been beloved of all of Winterfell. She’d had half the guards wrapped around her finger and she had been her Lady Mother’s pride, Catelyn-Come-Again they had called her, the beautiful Winter Rose. It was true, Arya had been more like their Father, but Ned Stark had loved Sansa with just as much Northern Pride. Bran and Rickon had trailed after her from the time they could walk. She’d been Jonquil in every game they’d ever played.

And he— well, he’d watched from the courtyard whenever she appeared. The farthest of the Starks to him. Robb and Arya and Bran and Rickon, they all rode and shot and played in the mud with him, fought with him, ate with him. But a Bastard boy was not supposed to loiter around a northern Lady.

“Sansa—”

“I meant it, what I said,” Sansa says, ripping Jon away from the tiny details on his sister’s face. “I loved them. I _miss_ them. But we’ve had to walk over their graves to learn from their mistakes.”

“We did, Sansa,” Jon tells her. “We _did_ learn from Robb.”

For the first time, Sansa turns to him and meets his gaze and for once he sees the real Sansa Stark. It is somehow more terrifying than the armor. There is something bright shining in her eyes, something cold, something cutting. He’s stared down White Walkers and the blue of their long-dead eyes is nothing compared to his sister. It wakes something in him up. Something that should not be woken. Something that causes his eyes to flicker down to her pale lips instead.

And as she leaves him in front of Robb’s statue, she accuses, “Did we?”


	3. Chapter Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I haven’t _been_ in the North,” Jon spits. It does not come out as— _you confiscated my ship and kept us stranded on Dragonstone for three months_ — though it is a close thing. 
> 
> And Jon doesn’t even notice it really, doesn’t even hear the way it came out, bitter and angry and not the Game he is trying to play, the way it hangs until the silence of the room starts to ring in his ears, and he tears his attention away from the storm outside. He sees the looks on their faces, the mistake he’s made, the flare of temper from Daenerys that tells him that she is not pleased. The words die in Jon’s throat.
> 
> “With respect, your Grace,” Davos adds, behind Jon’s back. “Lady Sansa knows more of the state of the North than any soul in Winterfell. Perhaps you might ask her.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> what the fuck you _mean_ it's been four months since I updated

Jon does not sleep. He’d intended to. He’d shut his eyes and tried to push it all away, but something keeps at him, something from down in the Crypts, something that seems to have followed him out from beneath Winterfell’s hollowed resting place. It’s so late that the sun will rise in just a few short hours, but even as he lies down on Robb’s old bed and shuts his eyes— it is like an ever-present thing. Hunting him.

Since his return to life, his dreams have been fleeting things. Disjointed scenes and images that skip and repeat at random, like a broken wheel of a windmill.

Some nights he dreams he is Bran falling from the Broken Tower.

Other times he dreams that Winterfell is burning again, as it had once before. He stands in the middle of the courtyard as it burns, surrounded by charred masses in all directions as a winged shadow flies overhead. He cannot move, he cannot breathe for all the smoke, he cannot get the air out of his lungs fast enough to scream as Winterfell dissipates before his very eyes—

Other times he dreams of the absolute nothing that had greeted him after his brothers’ blades. There had been no light or dark or warmth or cold but the absolute absence of any sensation.

And worst, the worst of them, are the dreams where Jon sees the woken dead, marching, ever at pace with one another, never turning, or stumbling, or resting, just continuing onward through the fog and the snowfall and the ever unchanging white landscape until no life is left on Westeros and Winter has consumed the whole continent.

But tonight, what he sees is not the Night King, but something else: a cold, frozen thing, with molten hair and blue, blue eyes, eyes like the oldest ice, and an iron crown atop her head.

 

_________

 

His Lady’s late night and early morning activities have unfortunately made Jaime Lannister both a nightly shadow and an early riser— a lesser Knight might take to complaining. But in this particular instance it is the hush before a storm that brings him out of bed, out of his chambers, and down onto Winterfell’s ramparts. He is no green squire, he understands what that smell is, understands why not even the hounds are howling, and where to find the young boys crying in the shadowed corners because they have no wish to die before the sun rises.

And perhaps, like his Lady, he has learned how to tell when there is trouble on the horizon simply by the smell of the snow and the direction that the wind has started blowing.

But, there is no orange glow of fire over the eastern hills, no matter how hard Jaime scans the horizon. No distant horns. No figures appearing over the crest of the snow. No giant shadows crashing over the hills. No screams in the distance.

Just the noises of a sleeping castle.

Until there isn’t. A voice, behind him, “You _can’t_ be serious.”

Jaime doesn’t quite jump, doesn’t give Tyrion the satisfaction. Instead he grips his Stark cloak and wraps it better around his bad arm, tucks his chin in, and turns towards his younger brother like they aren’t on opposite sides of this having a conversation that is both pathetically overdue and absolutely _should not_ be happening. Stares, blankly, and isn’t of the mind to wonder what the Hand of the Queen might be doing on this lonely rampart long before dawn. Instead, gives, “I’m hardly ever serious, little brother. I’d like to think that you still know that, almost better than anybody.”

Tyrion looks just as ridiculous in these Stark cloaks as he must, Jaime imagines. Like a child wrapped in their father’s blanket. Drowning in it.

But Tyrion doesn’t back away, doesn’t cower. “You know of what I speak, Jaime.”

“Fairly sure I don’t.”

“You are far from the most unobservant Lannister, Jaime,” Tyrion insists. “So I repeat: you _can’t_ be serious.”

“Ah,” Jaime gives. “You mean swearing my allegiance to House Stark,” he pauses, knows fully that this isn’t what Tyrion means, but won’t give it up that easy. “I think it was the most logical choice, don’t you agree? The King is a dolt, but a good fighter, like his father—”

“That’s not what I mean, Jaime.”

“Well, then, I’m not entirely sure I know of what you speak.”

“You aren’t that good of an actor,” Tyrion insists. “I always possessed that expertise and was never good for anything else, according to father.”

It’s a long breath before the two of them seem to remember _that_ old hurt— so much has happened since that day, since this Targaryen Queen—that it seems like Tywin Lannister died a decade ago instead of just barely a handful of years. That one of them standing on these ramparts is directly responsible for said death— no, that isn’t fair, either. Jaime had let Tyrion out of his prison cell, tried to be the good knight he had been once, before the Mad King.

And then the old pieces seem to fit into place as they both realize who they are, _where_ they are: the bitter and pathetic last Lions of their House.

_Do you? A forty-year-old-knight with one hand?_

The mood changes considerably, as if commanded to by this damned Northern wind.

Jaime doesn’t say anything. Tyrion doesn’t say anything, either, though it looks like he stops and tries and stops again several times until the two of them are just standing out on the ramparts, the Drunken Fool and the Kingslayer, Oathbreaker, Man-Without-Honor. A thousand miles away from home and the last bastions of ten thousand years of their family pride. Serving a Targaryen and a Stark respectively.

“I was glad to see you here, Jaime,” Tyrion offers, after a long period of silence. Stops. Tries again. Jaime just barely looks his way. “I— things at the Dragon Pit did not go according to plan, as I’m sure you’re aware. I had hoped that Cersei might keep the promise she gave me.”

A lie, the both of them know, and not a good one. Jaime had been too stupid and too slow, good with numbers and fighting and riding but unable to do anything required for the Heir of Casterly Rock, too loyal to Cersei to do anything but give up his life to stay close to her, to protect her from Robert’s whoremongering. Tyrion’s crime, as he proclaimed, had been to be born a dwarf. Tyrion has always seen Cersei for what she is, their father’s daughter, firstborn, his true heir-come-too-late, imperfect only in that she was born a woman and unable to inherit Casterly Rock and become head of their House.

And Jaime— Jaime has seen her measure, now. Before he had been blinded. Drawn in. Dragged down to do her bidding as she bid: but now three children are in the ground before he is. “Did you?”

“Yes,” Tyrion says. “Whatever— whatever passed. I loved Myrcella and Tommen more than I can describe.”

That hurt is still too near, too close, too much— far too much, too much even for Jaime, who does nothing but turn away, turns back towards the horizon and the City-Camps in any direction for as far as the eye could see. It may be his worst sin, but Joffrey’s death faded quickly, especially with the events that immediately followed it. Olenna might have been vile and vicious in her twilight but she had been right, too. He had been a little _cunt_ who’d had the misfortune of growing up in Robert’s shadow.

But Myrcella had died in his arms and Tommen died in his absence.

Jaime’d had no time to process it, and Cersei had gone cold to anything and everything. Winning was all that mattered. That and the secret Jaime is keeping from the whole world.

“Your love is not enough, little brother,” Jaime says. “And now you and I stand on opposite sides of it all.”

“That was not my intention.”

“Was it not?” Jaime asks. “You knelt down and swore allegiance to this new Targaryen and did not think that she would tear down what little remains of House Lannister with all the rest?”

“No, it was not,” Tyrion bites. “I’d hoped to shield you from it as best I could— No, Jaime, that is true—I thought the worst of it was over, after the Armistice. But your arrival and the news that Cersei was sending no aid, that she had broken her offered truce, that was bad enough, as you well know! And to then find you here, shielding the Lady of Winterfell with your Stark cloak, and whispering into her ear at every feast!”

“I have done nothing of the sort,” Jaime says, and then, blinking in the early morning light, remembers that the whole point of this thing is to plant a convincing lie that Jaime Lannister has fallen in love with the Lady of Winterfell.

To stop the very thing that Tyrion is no doubt here to discuss.

“I am fulfilling an oath,” he says. Scrambles, “I did not intend for it to— she is— beautiful and kind. Effervescent.”

Jaime does not say— _she reminds me of who Myrcella might have been_ —only without the grief-for-armor and the eyes that have seen far too much death and torment for one who’s never seen the after of a battle. He does not say how he sees something of Cersei in her, sometimes, and it makes him ache in complex ways. Ache for the sister that has long passed, who got torn down by Robert and Pycelle and the Game, and the High Sparrow.

He does not say that Sansa Stark had been a last mad grab for the honor-price he paid two decades ago and that she had pulled him North like a moth to flame.

Perhaps it had not begun that way: perhaps it had been her Sworn Shield, tall and blonde and stronger than any man Jaime had ever fought against, perhaps it had been the vehement _fuck loyalty_ that had crawled into his ribcage and grown like a well-fed sapling faster than Jaime could rip it out. Perhaps he had been thinking of coming North since Brienne had stepped into his tent at Riverrun and offered to return Oathbreaker, because she had fulfilled both their oaths. Perhaps standing in those ramparts and lifting his hand as their boat disappeared into the morning fog had been the most painful thing Jaime Lannister has ever done.

But here, now, the moment of that the Dragon Queen had called for his _spine_ replays in his head, of how Sansa Stark, who had not so long ago been a trembling child in a court full of people that wanted only to wring her dry, had dragged him— Jaime Lannister, arguably the very reason why her father is dead and the man who pushed her brother from the Broken Tower— behind her, and put herself between him and the Targaryen Conquerer.

“She is,” Jaime tries. Chokes on it. _Idiot_. “Far more than a forty-year-old disgraced Kingsguard with no family, no title, no fortune, and one hand deserves.”

A truth, Jaime finds, and even Tyrion seems to believe it. Jaime hadn’t really intended it to slip out, but there it is. It isn’t long before he has to turn away.

“It would be—” Tyrion starts, and stops, inhales, starts again. “Alliances must be made, in more than just words. Daenerys has been less than _pleased_ with the North’s reception, I’m sure I don’t have to remind you—”

“Really?” Jaime asks, with false curiosity. “You’d think you might have warned her of it—”

“—Of _what_ _options that leaves_.”

A lie. Not even a good lie. He can see it on Tyrion’s face. He looks as if he’d rather be ripping his own fingernails out or pouring good wine down into the sewers of Flea Bottom.

And it leaves a bad taste underneath Jaime’s tongue.

“Feeling protective?” Jaime asks, because he, too, grew up in King’s Landing. He is Cersei’s twin, he has shared breath with her from their first, he knows how to strike a blow to save his own skin. “Feeling a sudden urge to protect her virtue? Even after you so nobly denied your rites as Husband for the sake of your honor?”

At this, Tyrion almost snaps his teeth and points an accusatory finger Jaime’s way. “ _Don’t_.”

“I rather wonder what the King in the North would have to say about that,” Jaime continues anyway, pushing on.

Another grimace: Jaime _knows_ what the King in the North will say.

Just to twist the knife, to rub salt in the wound, Jaime adds, “It’s not as if your Targaryen conquerer mentions it at every opportunity.”

Except for the fact that this is exactly what she does. Jaime has barely been able to leave his Lady’s side, for all the whispers of alliances and unhappy Dragon Queens have followed their every steps. Every meal, every meeting, every tour of the Glass Gardens and Godswood that Jaime just tags along with doing Knightly, Sworn-Shieldy things, they mention it in one way or another.

If the Dragon Queen cannot have one, it appears as if she intends to bind the other to her Hand of the Queen.

Jaime huffs, and his breaths makes a fog almost as thick as the fog around them. “How you must have hated father so. To run right from King’s Landing to the Targaryen camps.”

The news hadn't come easy to Jaime, either, especially after the news of their Father's death had broke when the bells started ringing from King's Landing all the way to Maidenpool, all throughout the night. And to only realize that there was  _one_ person capable of shooting Tyrion Lannister as he shat over his chamberpot— no.

Jaime did not sleep that night. Did not sleep for three nights after.

And yet now, on the ramparts of Winterfell, quiet, from his left, “It has nothing to do with that.”

“And I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that Sansa Stark remains the key to the North,” Jaime supplies, without a thought, gesturing out to the Main Keep with his bad hand. “Nothing to do with the fact that she is the rightful heir to three of the kingdoms your Conquerer has come to conquer. Nothing to do with the fact that she has gained the love and loyalty of the people she shelters here, nothing to do with the fact that she has the King’s trust, and nothing to do with the fact that Sansa Stark is by far the biggest threat the Dragon Queen must face on the road to reclaiming the birthright that I stole away from her when I put my sword through her father’s chest.”

Tyrion inhales, exhales, huffs, inhales again, looking anywhere but at Jaime, and even he, the slow learner of the Lannisters, can tell that this is not a conversation he wants to be having nor an issue that he wants to keep pursuing.

No, Jaime can see the puppet strings where they hold his little brother up around his wrists and ankles.

“It is the smartest move,” Tyrion insists, lowering his voice even though there is not another soul for hundreds of feet in any direction, and the snowfall dampens any sound besides. “He— _they_ — have to know that. Marriages are often the way that alliances are sealed and it is the only way I can think of to solve this without _bloodshed_ , you know this Jaime—” and Jaime turns away from him, if Tyrion wants to think him a jilted lover, then so be it, but Jaime more disgusted at their father’s voice coming out of Tyrion’s mouth. Tyion grabs onto Jaime’s northern cloak but raises his voice to carry over the wind anyway. “You know how it will be, Jaime!”

“Tell that to the Lannister forces, what little of them remain,” Jaime gives. He’d spit it out, if he didn’t think the Northern wind would freeze it against his skin. Instead it’s just harsh and empty. No rage. “Tell that to Randyll and Dickon Tarly.”

At this, what little color remains on Tyrion’s usually reddened face drains.

 

_________

 

Daenerys summons her Council before first light, and as he has been these last few weeks, Jon is included in these summons. He is an outsider, a Wolf in a Den that he does not belong in, and the other advisors seem to think along similar veins. It is insult enough that today, Daenerys holds the Council in _his_ chambers instead of her own.

Jon does what he can, invites them in, has one of the maids come in and stoke his fire but still dons his Stark cloak. He wishes he’d had the good sense to ask for something to break their fasts, but he hasn’t.

Sansa would have. He knows this. She knows how to play this game.

Would have known how to _not_ get them into this mess in the first place. She’d told him not to go south: _you’re abandoning your home, you’re abandoning your people_ —

Jon does not wish he could go back and heed Sansa’s words, because he now knows, more than ever, that Dragon’s Fire is more valuable as an asset than Dragonglass. He saw the Dragon Queen’s children mow down entire herds of wights even if one was shot from the sky. A whole army with every last child armed with a Dragonglass dagger wouldn’t be able to accomplish such a task without adding to the Night King’s Army. It is a necessary sacrifice for the good of Man. _I am the shield that guards the realms of men_.

This is what he tells himself. Repeats his vows, though he no longer is a man of the Night’s Watch. Keeps coming back to that cornerstone as the council begins.

When the dead come South of the Wall— and that is a matter of when, and not _if_ , Daenerys’ dragons must be on the field of battle. This Jon is sure of. It is the prize that he paid for, continues to pay for. And even when the doubt begins to grip him, even when his dreams linger, this fact remains true. No matter the cost, they need the Targaryen Queen on their side. Fighting for the good of Westeros. They must keep her focus pointed towards the North. Even if that means that Jon must beg entrance into her bed once more.

But here, in the Council, Daenerys’ advisors argue about subjects that he _should_ not be involved in: some matter about Masters and Dothraki, wherein some of them— Grey Worm and Missandei, he thinks— glance at him before they begin to speak in that foreign tongue.

Jon is not wanted here. Yet Daenerys does not want him out of her sight.

They do not trust him enough to speak of some matters plainly: there is a half of him that would happily vacate his rooms if it meant escape— but another, darker part, that is angry that after all he has done to prove his loyalty, they do not trust him.

With little else to do and to hide this darker flash of something else, he goes to the window. Opens the wooden panel just a bit, enough to let a breeze in. It is a small thing— even with the hot springs helping to heat the castle, what little warmth they can make with a fire escapes easily, but still. The cold feels good against his skin. Makes him feel more right with the world.

Even on Dragonstone, which was more windy and brisk than truly cold— sometimes he’d closed his eyes and tried to remember how the frost burned.

Except now, with his dreams still clinging to him, even despite himself, the sting of the cold wind against his cheek makes him think of Sansa’s cold nose pressed into his neck at Castle Black. The way that she’d stared and stared and stared at him before finally breaking and flinging herself into his arms. Her smile. The sweetness in her voice.

The way she’d waved as he’d said his goodbyes and gone south. The way that the color seemed to bubble up through her skin when she yelled at him. The way that she’d welcomed him back without a single hint of missing him.

And then it hurts again, somewhere in his chest. Twists. Pulls. They had not ended things well last night, in the crypts.

Perhaps that is why Jon’s dreams were so vivid.

Perhaps that’s why— it has been three years since Robb was murdered by the Freys, but last night Jon _swore_ he heard his voice, like it was pressed into his ear, stronger than ever: _you are our brother_.

He does not feel like a brother. There had been a time once when his deepest, most shameful wish was to be a real Stark: to eat at the Stark table, to wear new clothes that the Stark children got, to be mothered by Catelyn. To be more than just a Bastard Boy.

To be able to linger around Sansa without feeling like some baseborn _thing_ meant only to corrupt her purity.

It had been easier, these past months, to try and drown these foreign thoughts out with others, thoughts of the war to come and his responsibility to his people and the North, of the White Walkers. And then, later, with thoughts of strategy, of trying to get this Dragon Queen to do as the North needed. Or it had been easier to lie, each time he caught his thoughts drifting back to Winterfell, back to the blue-eyed wraith he called sister. The one that he’d left the North to. The one that he’d run from. It was not duty that carried him south. It was not duty that carried him to Dragonstone and past the Wall and back down to King’s Landing and the Dragon Pits. It was not duty that drove him to swear fealty to a Dragon Queen. Even if it meant losing Cersei as an ally.

There had been a part of him that Jon had not acknowledged, that had hoped for more than just a treaty with a Dragon Queen: who had hoped that a hundred leagues between him and Winterfell might stop the tide of _him_. Of what he was. Of what he had been brought back as.

But it hadn’t. Even now Jon can feel Sansa’s gaze burrowing just beneath his skin, from last night, and every time she has caught his eye since he returned home: _Did we_?

“My _Khalasar_ is adept at killing all living things,” the Dragon Queen insists, the conversation continuing on behind Jon. It is the Dragon Queen’s voice that brings his mind back from Robb’s Statue last night. “Slavers from Slaver’s Bay, Shadowbinders from Asshai, Lannisters in their golden armor.”

And Jon, even from his place at the window, spares enough time to glance at Tyrion, who’s expression is shuttered and closed-off. The Hand of the Queen looks tired, the kind of tired that only comes from days without rest and the weight of the world resting on your shoulders. Jon knows it too well.

But from the other side of the room, like she hasn't noticed anything amiss, like the thought pleases her, “The dead will present no challenge for them.”

“Your Grace,” Jon sighs, exhausted already and the sun hasn’t even touched the sky. He is tired of placating, but placating seems to be all that he has done these past weeks. He turns away from the window. “With respect. Your Dothraki and Unsullied will mean nothing against the Night King. For every soldier that we lose, there will be another wight marching against us.”

Jon Snow has marched an army through the cold and watched a brother die feet in front of him and been stabbed to death by his own people and seen the dead rise up again. This will not be his first battle, though it may very well be his last.

What’s more— this is not the first time he has reminded this Council of this. Jon had hoped to find an alley in Jorah Mormont, the only other soul in the room that went north of the Wall and saw what was slowly marching towards them.

Yet Ser Jorah does nothing but seize every opportunity to prove his steadfastness and loyalty to his Queen.

“We’re outnumbered ten to one by the kindest estimates,” Ser Davos grumbles, at Jon’s side. “This won’t be like a normal war. We can’t starve them out. We can’t box them in. We can’t hope for an advantage in numbers.”

Daenerys does not like this, she clasps her hands together, her outfit severe like the one she had first been wearing when Jon had arrived on Dragonstone— she is no dainty savior today, but a military leader of her thus far missing Dothraki and Unsullied forces. She crosses around the War Table and comes closer to the side of his quarters that Jon and Davos occupy. Jon schools his expression into something more akin to an uninterested party, cold and detached, grim and brooding.

Not the same expression as the one he wore when begged entrance into her bedchamber aboard the ship not three weeks past.

“Then what would you suggest, Lord Snow?” Daenerys asks of him.

_Lord Snow_. An insult, reminder of his station. He sees it every time she addresses him this way, the way that those loyal to House Stark flinch and tighten their grip.

An ineffective insult against someone who never wanted to be King in the North in the first place.

But still, Jon squares his shoulders, lifts his chin, looks to Davos and Jorah before he considers the question and glances at the map before he answers. More to buy himself a moment than anything else.

“We have six shipments of Dragonglass coming from Dragonstone, in addition to the shipments that we managed to bring with us,” Jon informs them. “Enough perhaps for three hundred broadswords and two thousand arrows. Enough to make a difference, surely, but not enough to arm even a tenth of the soldiers we have at our command— even if the shipments manage to get here through the storm, and if the blacksmiths have enough time to forge them.” And he pauses, breathes, tries to borrow some of the _other_ that he has seen Sansa use, that old thing that covers her skin like ice because he knows that this next bit will be the hardest. “But the most important part, your Grace, the best defense we have against the Dead, will be your Dragons.”

This is not news. It is not news to anyone that went North of the Wall for the wight hunt, but still Jon sees the _shift_ in her expression— from confident Dragonrider to the brief expression of grief on the ship down to King’s Landing, to what Jon would almost call fear.

Daenerys turns away from him, which makes Jon panic.

She stands next to her other advisors, turns, first towards Missandei and then towards Jorah Mormont.

“You’ve already lost one, your Grace,” Jorah intones, leaning in close though his words can be heard by all. Jon tilts sideways somewhat as her attention goes to him instead. “You cannot risk losing them all.”

Jon has spent enough time with Jorah Mormont to understand the weight of this conversation, and knows that this is slipping through his fingers faster than he can catch it. If the Dragons are not the first defense, people will die. _His_ people will die, they will be the first to fall, and then the Night King will raise them once again and they will start killing their brothers and their families.

He knows the look on Daenerys’ face, too. She’s considering it.

“Keep them away from the Army of the Night King,” Jorah suggests. “If Cersei Lannister attacks from the South, they will be the best defense we have against her.”

Jon swallows. “Cersei will not attack from the South.”

“You cannot know that,” Daenerys snaps. She turns her full temper towards him, and Jon does not cower. He has given up his crown, yes, but he cannot show a willingness to bow in his own home. The northern Lords accuse him of cowardice already. “She has already broken her oath. She has _betrayed_ me _._ ”

Her temper is dangerously close to coming out, _fire and blood_ , and Jon is suddenly thankful that he only allowed the Dragons to come as close as White Knife.

He has enough nightmares as it is: shadows rolling over Winterfell’s tallest tower and shrieking as they passed, as First Keep lies in ashes beneath his feet.

The Broken Tower one last bastion against the skyline, old and half-standing, crumbling. The tallest thing from horizon to horizon— like a giant’s long-rotted ribcage on a barren landscape.

Jon cannot help the cold _thing_ that drips along his spine.

“It is not an issue of betrayal, your Grace,” Jon tells her. He keeps his voice soft and his expression blank. “Her soldiers will never be able to march in this much snow. It’s up to two feet as far south as the Eyrie and Oldstones. We are in Winter, your Grace,” he says. “The Lannisters are a southern army. They would freeze to death before they passed Moat Cailin. The North, however, is used to year-round summer snows. Our castles and soldiers are built for this.”

She considers this. Her advisors offer nothing. Tyrion offers nothing. Jon, he tries to see it all. Fails.

But Daenerys moves, smooth as if she were floating. Asks, “So what would you have me do, Lord Snow?”

And there it is again, the— he does not have a word for it. The silk smooth undertone of her voice, the darkened look in her gaze that speaks to something more than just desire. Anger, maybe.

“Would you have me leave my Unsullied and my Blood Riders here?” She asks. Moves a piece on the table, makes a show of picking it up and examining it, before placing right where it had been. “Take on the Night King’s army with nothing but Rhaegal and Drogon?”

He cannot falter. He cannot fail. “This in not the kind of problem that will be solved simply with more men and more horses. For every soldier we lose, his army grows.”

Silence meets him. No one speaks, not even the Dragon Queen.

“My Queen,” Jorah clears his throat.

Daenerys silences him with the gesture of her hand. She does not turn away from Jon and Jon knows that if he loses her attention now, if she turns away, it is lost.

“My soldiers will be here to keep the peace,” Daenerys informs him. “Drogon and Rhaegal will stop the White Walkers.”

Jon does not respond to this: does not let them see him let out the breath he has been holding. No, instead Jon says nothing, does nothing, lets this Dragon Queen believe that this is some gift of wisdom that she has bestowed upon him, nods his head, thoughtfully, like he considers it a wise move, and paces once again to the window overlooking the Sept.

It is getting colder. He can barely see anything through the white that has descended over Winterfell.

Talk continues behind him. Jon’s very bones begin to itch, to move, and the cold bite of the Northern winds no longer help. It feels like Winter has caught hold of him and he will suffocate the longer he must remain inside. And yet, somewhere, Jon knows that it is not fresh air he needs. He wouldn’t feel so suffocated in the Great Hall, or in the Godswood, or in the Courtyard.

As long as he could catch a glimpse of—

“Lord Snow,” Tyrion calls out, and Jon snaps backward, turns and realizes that the whole Council has their attention on him and he must have missed a question someone had asked.

“Your Pardon,” Jon says.

“Happens to the best of us,” Tyrion gives him, with another play of his fingers against his empty cup. “The Queen was asking if you were aware of Winterfell’s current wood stock.”

Wood. His eyes catch on the table, and all too slow he realizes that they mean for heavy siege weaponry. Winterfell unfortunately lacks in that department, since it burned.

Winterfell could withstand a siege for months. With time to prepare, and with a stabilized population: both of which they lack. Before he had gone to Dragonstone he had sent what few woodworkers remained of their forces and the Wildlings into the Wolfswood, but can’t say how much they were able to cut down. And the Dead won't use normal siege tactics.

Jon answers, “I am not.”

“Ah,” Tyrion says. “Unfortunate.”

Jon has spent far too long in Command to falter at the tone in Tyrion’s voice, and does not need to explain _why_ he does not have this information. It should be clear why: Jon spent three months on Dragonstone, and North of the Wall, and in King’s Landing, and traveling between all three.

“And your infantry, and cavalry,” Tyrion tries again, with his falsely positive tone. “Do you have the number of how many stand in your ranks, ready to fight?”

“I don’t.”

“You aren’t aware of the workings of your own people,” Ser Jorah comments, stiff as he ever is, and Jon looks to him and knows that he’s looking for a weakness, as if to point it out to the Dragon Queen and say, _look_. “Your Lord Father knew every inch and every town and every village in the North during his day.”

“I haven’t _been_ in the North,” Jon spits. It does not come out as— _you confiscated my ship and kept us stranded on Dragonstone for three months_ — though it is a close thing.

And Jon doesn’t even notice it really, doesn’t even hear the way it came out, bitter and angry and not the Game he is trying to play, the way it hangs until the silence of the room starts to ring in his ears, and he tears his attention away from the storm outside. He sees the looks on their faces, the mistake he’s made, the flare of temper from Daenerys that tells him that she is not pleased. The words die in Jon’s throat.

“With respect, your Grace,” Davos adds, behind Jon’s back. “Lady Sansa knows more of the state of the North than any soul in Winterfell. Perhaps you might ask her.”

_No_ , Jon thinks, muscles in his hand spasming. He stops it before it is noticeable to the room, but only just— _Do not bring her here. I’ve already made her face this dragon once._

Jon tries, “I don’t think that will be necessary—”

But the Dragon Queen nods, thoughtfully, looking directly at Jon. He isn’t expecting it and nearly shows it all. Remembers the price he paid. His expression must be too much, far too much, and suddenly he wishes he could be more like Arya or Bran or Sansa and be like a statue down in the Crypts like they could. Jon does as he can and tries to reel himself back in. Instead of the panic of a man— _brother_ — trying and failing to protect his family, he goes for bored. Scowling, brooding, isn’t what they all say he does? Tries not to let the way that his lungs are clogging his throat show, tries not to let any of it show.

By some miracle Daenerys does not seem to notice his inner conflict. Perhaps she cannot see behind this lie, cannot tell the difference as Sansa so often can— between brooding Northern King and the guilt that he bears.

Instead she nods, like it is a wise move, like the decision has already been made even though she is a Dragon in the Wolves’ Den. “I would be grateful if your Lady Sister would offer her assistance.”

Her tone and posture are obvious, even to Jon: she will accept nothing less than his compliance.

It is difficult to keep his expression neutral, thoughtful, like he’s considering— but he knows. He is not a good enough player of the Game for this. Daenerys cannot be trifled with, especially now. He must get her to send her Dragons North, to face the army of the Dead.

With little else to do, Jon nods at one of the few Northerners allowed into the room, as Jon’s own guard. The man nods in return and gives a short bow before he exits the chamber to bring the Lady of Winterfell to the summons of her _King_.

While they wait, while Jon’s spine straightens, turns to stone the way that he can feel the panic building in him, chased by some half-remembered dream. The council behind him turns their talk to the south, with Tyrion doing what, to Jon, seems his best to put a positive spin on Cersei’s betrayal.

Varys’ spies report nothing, other than countless country farmers fleeing to King’s Landing now that the Reach and Highgarden are ash and rubble. “Her few allies have abandoned her— she may be spending her resources preparing for the coming winter. We’ve received reports that the last harvest from the Reach and the Crownlands was delivered to the grain stores in King’s Landing.”

“Yes, your Grace,” Varys adds. “A wise move considering the population of King’s Landing, and the last few years have not been kind to them.”

“Haven’t been kind to anybody, from the sounds of it,” says Mormont.

Jon watches as Tyrion once again plays with the empty cup in his hand, taps the rim against the wooden Wartable. “No,” he says, vehemently. “No, it has _not_.”

“We cannot be foolish enough to believe that she will make no move against us,” Daenerys tells them. “I have been merciful before and the Masters moved against me, I imagine this will be the same. The snow may slow them and give us some warning but we should be vigilant about keeping an eye on the southern border. And, if nothing else,” Daenerys adds, “We have her beloved brother. A powerful deterrent against sending her armies north of the Crownlands, I find.”

The room— half the room, really, Jon and Tyrion and Jorah and Davos and Varys, stops. Stops speaking in undertones, stops in their planning—just stops. Davos shares a quick look with Jon and Jon, who is tired of it, tired of it all, tired of having to spend more time convincing a Targaryen heir to not upheave what little peace the North has managed to cleave together— who doesn’t understand the meaning of _Guest Right_ — that he can do little more than turn away again instead of speaking up, trying to explain, trying to _convince_. How does he convince someone that the reason that the Dragon Queen could not demand Jaime Lannister’s head is the same reason they cannot use him as a hostage?

The longer he spends in the presence of Daenerys Targaryen, the more Jon knows that he should have never gone to Dragonstone.

“Your Grace,” Lord Varys begins. “Perhaps—”

But there is a knock at the door, that seems to put a stop to that conversation and bring them back to the topic at hand, even Jon. Especially Jon.

From his place at the window he has a perfect view of the door and the antechamber beyond, and somehow it feels like his whole field of vision is focused on a tiny, warped gnarl of the wood’s paneling just above the handle that’s been there longer than Jon and Robb had been alive.

One of Daenerys’ most trusted guards opens it to Brienne, who steps inside and gives a slight respectful bow to all.

Jon feels like the air has gone stagnant in his lungs.

His sister takes over the room as she enters, like she has filled the empty space. These were once Robb’s chambers and Jon has half a million memories of standing in the corner while the Stark children played, but that seems a lifetime ago now. Her furs pool around her skirts as she clasps her hands in front of her, ever the perfect Lady of Winterfell.

Daenerys is the first to greet her. “Lady Sansa.”

Tyrion stands from his chair immediately.

Jon cannot breathe. It’s back again, the hurt from last night. Red and severe and beautiful. There is something deep and foreign inside him that begs her to look, to meet his gaze, so that he might offer some comfort or some wordless apology. She does not look, does not even glance his way, but takes stock of the still and silence that greets her as Brienne takes her place against the wall, as the Lady of Winterfell stills, as a statue, and straightens to her full height. Against his own will, Jon finds that the absence of her attention sets something in him ablaze, pulls at him, stretches his ribcage six feet wide. Not in— rage, or anger, but something else entirely.

Like something else is now awake. Something in him. Something he did not die with.

But this is not _Sansa_. It is the Lady of Winterfell that commands the presence of every person here. Like Catelyn Stark had taken one more breath in this world, as off kilter as that makes Jon feel, with her molten hair and ice-for-eyes, in furs so black and inky it seems near blue in hue. He feels like a guest in his own rooms, intruding into something he shouldn’t. Swallows it all down: everything, _everything_ , even the shades that ripped him from his dreams this morning and tries for something less.

Her eyes are not kind. Not cruel, either, Jon knows, as he steps away from the wall.

Sansa gives a very formal nod of her head, but does not curtsey. “You summoned me, your Grace?”

Jon cannot even fathom how she must feel at the prospect of being summoned in her own home.

_This is what you bought_ , something inside him says.

Now his eldest sister faces down a Dragon and a Lion and a Spider and does not flinch, the armor does not break. Jon doesn’t know how she does it: he’s stood before these people before, on Dragonstone, and felt small. She takes them all in even as he watches, even as it feels like his feet would carry him to her side even without his leave.

“I did,” Daenerys tells her. “I understand how busy you must be, Lady Sansa— thank you for responding so quickly. I know that you must have so much responsibility resting upon you, with the running of this Castle. But I’ve also been informed that you are quite knowledgable of the North, its people, and all of its movements. Its status.”

Jon cannot warn his sister away now. It is too late.

“It’s weaknesses,” Daenerys continues.

Without thinking, Jon looks to Sansa, and it is now that she meets his gaze, face blank, but Jon _knows_ that look. It is the look of her mask, the Lady if Winterfell, and her armor, but somehow he knows what lies underneath and can feel it in the space somewhere just behind his left lung. Sansa pierces him as she has always pierced him, through his heart, and then it is over. Done.

So Jon, Jon nods his head and offers a smile, small, _so_ small, even watching eyes could not take anything from it.

But just as fast as it comes, it is gone. He has brought a Dragon home to Winterfell and the Lady of Winterfell turns her gaze away from him.

“I understand that Lord Snow was not kept appraised of the North’s progress during his visit to Dragonstone,” Daenerys says, as she turns a piece of parchment on the map over, idly, before looking back to them. “So I must assume, as Lady of Winterfell and Warden of the North, that you were left in Command.”

“You assume correctly, your Grace,” Sansa gives.

_No_ , Jon thinks. _Don’t draw the fire_.

He has brought a Dragon home and must keep it from burning the Wolf’s Den.

“Your Grace,” Jon begins.

Daenerys’ look silences him. When her attention turns away, onto Sansa, Jon allows himself to shut his eyes, because he has _failed_. His one duty was to protect his siblings. He cannot even keep them out of the Dragon’s reach.

“Then I take it,” Daenerys continues, “That you are aware of how many infantry and calvary belong to House Stark? How many bowmen? How many horses we have access to?”

Sansa does not speak, for a moment. Her silence makes Jon open his eyes, refocus. She shifts, minutely, and gracefully clasps her hands as any Highborn Lady would.

“I am not a Commander of my brother’s armies, your Grace,” Sansa gives her, and something inside Jon’s chest sinks straight down into his gut. _Brother_. _I deserve no such title_. “I know nothing of battles or strategies.”

_I don’t know_! _I don’t know anything about battles or armies_!

Jon does not move but he hears it almost as clear as if those words had just been spoken, from months ago, and for a mere moment he catches Sansa’s eye. Through a crack so small in her armor that he doubted a speck of dust could slip through, he feels it.

The— _thing_. From last night, in the Crypts. The thing that begs to be said but Jon will let it break him before it leaks.

_I did as commanded_ , _your Grace_ , she’d said, in the Godswood.

“No,” Daenerys tells her. Vividly reminds Jon that he and Sansa are _not_ the only people in these would-be council chambers. “No, but I’ve been told that you are quite proficient in ruling your Lord Brother’s lands while he came south. We are fighting against the dead, my Lady. Any advantage is an advantage I would have us use.”

_Advantage_. Such knowledge, even between those of an alliance, is not an advantage. Jon no longer has any doubt, Sansa does possess the knowledge that Daenerys seeks, but is choosing not to give it. She knows every last detail of the workings of Winterfell, he imagines that the Lords have all been reporting directly to her in his absence. He tries to give her a warning look, to discourage her, but Sansa will not turn her head an inch.

“Any help I might offer,” Sansa tells them all. “You shall have it.”

Recognizing defeat, but unwilling to let that out, Jon holds out his hand and guides Sansa to the table where they have begun to plan.

They have marked all of their troops, supplies, and strategy, though so far they’ve barely begun more than a few precautionary steps. A warning system of previously abandoned keeps and towers from one end of the Wall to another. All by the Dragon Queen’s planning: Jon is little more than a guest in these Chambers.

Sansa takes all of it in as Varys and Ser Jorah and Daenerys begin their questioning. “Lady Stark,” Varys starts. “You mentioned something about refugees last night at the feast. Do you know their number?”

“Some eight thousand,” Sansa offers. “More come every day.”

“Aye, and these are no fighters,” Davos tells them. “These are old folk, and children, and wounded soldiers. Sick ones, too, and those that have starved the last two harvests.” He crosses his arms, and his too-short fingers flex. Looks to each of them in turn. “They’re in no state to fight.”

Ser Jorah is the one to shift, then, accesses the table before him. Jon doesn’t move. “A few weeks of enough food on their plates may be enough for some of them. I’ve seen men stand back up for less.”

No response. Jon’s seen that, too, and the way that people tend to have one last wind when there is nothing standing between themselves and death.

But it is Davos that finds a problem with this line of thought.

“Even if we did, we can’t arm them,” Davos says. “We can barely arm the fightin’ men we _have_.”

They can’t: the blacksmiths are working day and night. As the days pass it is more of an issue of running out of metals for them to work with.

“We send those that cannot fight south,” Jon says. Thinks, and then looks south, on the map. “Send them to the Twins, or better, to the Eyrie,” he points past the Bloody Gate. The Eyrie would be the perfect place to defend from the Dead. “How many could the Eyrie support for an extended period of time?”

It is Tyrion the answers. “If we were to send rations with them? Four thousand, I believe. Perhaps five. This is probably a question best directed at Lord Royce.”

“They stay,” the Dragon Queen says, and it all quiets at her words. Jon straightens up over the War Table to find that Daenerys’ attention is on the lit hearth instead.

“They cannot fight,” Jon explains.

She does not look away from the lit fire, but stands rigid as the day she towered above his head from the throne on Dragonstone. She barely even spares the War Table a glance. “Put a rock in a child’s hand,” the Dragon Queen says, “And you will learn how hard he will fight against his enemy.”

He _has_ put a sword in a boy’s hand. He knows how it ends.

A piece of rope and a sudden stop.

“Those who _can’t_ fight, we send south,” Jon argues. His voice rises, against his will, because he cannot believe that he must _explain_ this. “Every unable body that falls will still march in the Night King’s army!”

“ _No_ ,” Daenerys argues. Turns back, and Jon sees the Dragon’s temper in her features. “In Meereen it was the smallest person that made the difference in defeating the Masters. One man in an army. One woman on the ramparts. We can protect them if they remain here, not in some distant refugee camp where Cersei Lannister might use them as leverage against _me_.”

This brings a cacophony of voices, with Jon only barely managing to keep his own in check— but he cannot even begin to understand that Daenerys would willfully _want_ to keep those that cannot fight here, as if she does not understand or cannot comprehend that the _dead will rise_ and that they have a crypt full of a thousand dead Starks beneath their feet.

The vast majority of the Council seems to be against this in one way or another, even Tyrion and the Spider, but then—

“We cannot,” Sansa’s voice rings out, clear and strong. It quiets the cacophony. “Winterfell is already overflowing with refugees from the whole of the North— from the outermost fishing villages on the Stony Shore to Widow’s Watch, and now from refugees fleeing from the fighting between Cersei’s armies and, forgive me, your Grace—” Sansa stops, gesturing briefly to Daenerys, “From your own armies.”

Jon spots the dangerous glint in the Dragon Queen’s eye before anyone else does, he saw it too many times on Dragonstone and readies to throw himself in front of Sansa if he must, but—

Another knock at the door.

He stops, Daenerys stops, Sansa stops. The Advisors stop squabbling, for once, and it is Ser Jorah that goes to open it. Jon cannot see who it is, but Jorah returns with a scroll held in his hands. Wordlessly he crosses the room— not to Daenerys’ side, who already has a pale hand held out for the scroll, but to Sansa’s.

Sansa does not take it, for a moment.

Jon should be looking at Daenerys, gauging her reaction, _placating_ , always placating, but he has eyes for no one but his sister. She hesitates for a moment before she takes the scroll from Ser Jorah’s hand, glances at the Dragon Queen, and opens it. Reads. Closes it back up again.

Refocuses her attentions on the map laid out before them. “Pardon, your Grace. Please continue.”

But Daenerys, Daenerys catches on it, looks to her advisors and seems, to Jon’s view, to stumble before she regains the words that the knock had interrupted. “I— yes. Very well.” She clears her throat. And then, “How many infantry and cavalry is House Stark providing?”

Jon does not bring up the issue of the refugees. And from the looks of the room, no one else is willing to bring it up, either.

But Sansa does not stumble. “Lord Baelish brought two thousand Knights with him to assist us. Of that two thousand, eighteen hundred are well enough to fight. Lord Royce assures me that four hundred more are making their way here from the farthest reaches of the Vale,” she says, and gestures towards Coldwater and Snakewood, on the easter coast of Westeros. “Whether they manage to make it through Moat Cailin remains to be seen.”

Jon frowns down at the map: the journey from the Vale to Winterfell takes upwards of three weeks with clear roads and fair weather. In the last three days alone, it’s snowed almost ten inches, on top of the snowfall that had already been.

It takes a moment for Jon to notice the silence in the room and the absence of any sign of recognition on her features, in her posture. The Dragon Queen does not move, and he understands it at last. Any objective that is not King’s Landing is unimportant. Any objective that does not get her closer to the Iron Throne and Cersei and her birthright is ignored.

She does not know that the pass of the Twins will be completely unmanageable under six feet of snow, let alone Moat Cailin, which is much farther North.

“We cannot count on them,” Jon explains, as gently as he can. “They will not make it in time, if they make it at all. Eighteen hundred from the Vale will have to be enough.”

Daenerys moves again, circles once more, and Jon does not think but shifts closer so that his shoulder is nearly touching Sansa’s cloak. There is something in the air that Jon does not like, but Sansa does not flinch. She keeps her gaze, ice, ever the Lady of Winterfell, on the Dragon Queen as she circles the War Table.

“And yet,” Daenerys says. “I managed to bring ten thousand Unsullied and six thousand Dothraki to the North, past the ice,” she pauses, looking back to the hearth when she reaches it. “Does Westeros have so little to offer, or are minor southern Houses hoarding men for their own uses?”

“Westeros has spent the last _seven_ _years_ in one war or another,” Davos begins, nearly forgotten at Jon’s other shoulder.

“Your Grace,” Sansa interrupts. “My brother’s Hand is correct. If you had brought your forces to Westeros when I was a child you would have found that House Stark alone had fifty thousand bannermen to our name, House Baratheon had a hundred thousand, the Lannisters nearly four times that. If not for the War of the Five Kings, Westeros be in a different state entirely,” she pauses, and Jon cannot but help hear the unspoken: _if you had invaded back then, you would have lost_. “The War of the Five Kings took much from the Great Houses, but the famine, riots, and slaughter that came after did not help. The Crown's debt to the Iron Bank of Braavos did not help, either. Jaime," and Jon bites down on it, bites down on the way that the Kingslayer's name comes out of his sister's lovely mouth—"Jaime tells me that the gold mines of Casterly Rock are long since gone dry. The forces that have gathered here are those that were supplied and prepared enough to make it this far North before the real cold set in.”

Jon does not even bother to correct his sister either, about how a Northern Lord cannot have a Hand of the King.

He is too busy watching Daenerys process this information, but aligns himself to Sansa’s shoulder. It cannot look like it, but he feels it all the same. For the first time in weeks— _months_ — he and Sansa are fighting the same battle. He’s spent so long trying to play this unfamiliar game that he’s forgotten what it felt like to have someone side with him instead of against him— and as Jon looks to Sansa, briefly, it only brings back other things, too. They had been like this, once, before he’d gone south.

“Winterfell is the last stronghold for a hundred leagues in any direction,” Jon says, leaving very little room for denial. Tyrion shifts in his chair, eyes on the map before them. “There _is_ nowhere else. As the Dead progress, more refugees will flee here, to Winterfell. If we turn them away, we will be sending them to their deaths.” And then he catches Daenerys’ eye. “Send those we can away now, while we still have time.”

“It’s too late,” Sansa interrupts, and Jon looks to her, not expecting this. “The real cold is beginning to set in. The crossing of Moat Cailin has frozen underneath nearly ten feet of snow. The moat is a week’s march from here in summer. None of the people that you would send south: the mothers, and the children, and the old, and the infirm— would make it on their own, and— forgive me, but it is my understanding that we could not spare the men to escort them.”

Daenerys’ fire seems to flicker, and she glances at Tyrion and the Spider, as well as Jon.

“Then what would you suggest, Lady Sansa?” Daenerys asks. “We cannot leave them here. We cannot send them away.”

Sansa straightens. Her eyes take in each person in the room: Spiders and Advisors and a Queen and a Maybe-King and Hands, all looking to her, Jon knows.

She must see what he sees as she looks down at the map of Westeros: Winterfell. The last defensible position in a hundred miles.

“This, I must leave to Jon’s expertise,” Sansa allows, and the sound of his own name once again _tugs_ on something inside him, something that he manages to forget and leave behind in the space between sleeping and waking. “Jon was named King in the North not because of his birthright, but because the North chose to follow him,” she tells him, and Jon knows that these words are for him and him alone. Sansa looks to him, looks through him, mere inches away. “They follow you still, brother. Whatever you decide.”

There is— _something_ there, some message, some meaning, that he cannot make out. He looks, and he looks, from Sansa’s face to the War Table beneath their fingers, the way that the pieces are laid out across the surface.

Sansa’s fingers are a hair’s breath away from his own and he tries not to catch on that, too.

His sister is right: they cannot keep the refugees here. But they cannot send them away, either— and the longer they wait, the less chance they have of surviving the journey. They can barely spare a single soldier.

There is no  _right_ choice, as there so seldom is. Either way: they lose.

“It’s not just the men that’s fighting this war,” he begins. Gets stronger with every passing word. “It’s all of us— the girls on Bear Island, and the Fishwives from Flint’s Finger. Winterfell is the safest bastion we have,” he turns to Sansa, looking for something, anything, something of when they had named him King in the North and she had smiled up at him, a token of her blessing. She doesn't, she simply watches his every move. “At least here we can protect them and not leave them to die on the Kingsroad. Here we can treat the ill and the wounded, protect from the worst of Winter.”

He turns to Daenerys, too, who is basking in this victory. Placated.

But as he turns back to Sansa, something passes over his sisters’ face that he almost catches. Something unfamiliar. Something of the thing down in the Crypts. Something old. Something cold.

“And those that fall?” Davos asks. “We’ll be fighting our own then— our wives, and our children.”

“If it comes to that,” Jon starts, faltering, faltering because of the look on Sansa’s face. Scrambles for something, anything, to hold onto. “We’ll march our armies to the Dead, we’ll turn their focus. We’ll—”

There’s another knock on Jon’s door. Brisk. Urgent.

The thought dies on Jon’s tongue. Exasperated, Daenerys motions for the guard to open the door, and once again holds her hand out for the desperate-looking messenger. But the Dragon Queen’s basking glow fades faster than summer snow when the messenger once again bypasses Daenerys completely, and, to Jon’s dismay, hands it directly to the Lady of Winterfell.

Sansa must feel the same dismay as he does, because she hesitates. Her fingers resist making contact with the parchment even as Jon watches, but the moment passes before he can blink.

Something in Jon, something that’s stayed with him from before the dark and the cold and the nothing, wonders how he’ll have to placate this insult. Another atonement.

But this thought fades away. Jon knows enough of Sansa to know that the words on the scroll are immediately concerning to her. It is in the way she shifts, drifts away, eyes on the words on the parchment. He cannot make out the broken seal from where he stands, but he knows the expression that turns the corners of her mouth down. Knows the way that her eyes scan in a desperate fashion. It’s a strange echo of reading Ramsay’s demand for fealty, at Castle Black. Every bone in Jon’s arm wants to reach out across the space between them as they stand shoulder to shoulder before the Dragon Queen and catch her thin fingers in his. But he does not, he resists it. Too many eyes and this Game he’s playing is crumbling even as he tries to hold it together.

“Sansa,” he tries, as a brother would. She does not react, but continues to stare down at the page like she is frozen. “ _Sansa_.”

She looks up from the scroll. It is almost as if she’s forgotten that there are other people in the room, the _openness_ in her gaze. This is not the armor, nor the Lady of Winterfell. No, for one, terrifying moment, he recognizes the girl that had thrown herself at him in the courtyard at Castle Black. The one that had been so frozen and tired and torn down that she’d grabbed at him and pressed her frozen nose into his shoulder and hadn’t let go. The one that had bore into him down in the Crypts before Robb’s statue. The one he's  _missed_.

_Sansa_ —

“Excuse me, your Grace,” Sansa murmurs, already moving towards the door. Brienne follows, at the ready. “Your Grace,” she says to Jon, pausing just briefly before him before she leaves his side. The Lady of Winterfell once again. “I must go.”

 

_________

 

In the Godswood, the Three-Eyed Raven sits next to the Heart Tree— at least, his mortal body sits. He is not there. He is searching the branches of what has not yet come, hundreds of tiny might-happens and could-bes. Before it was clear, the steps necessary for the path ahead.

The Starks had been given a card to play, a card that would out-play all others, a secret Targaryen Prince who would beat all other claims to the Iron Throne, but now the Three-Eyed Raven sees only scorched earth down that branch.

Instead he sees two massive hordes of men in Stark Grey and Targaryen Red, stepping on ruby stones of a slow-moving river. Bran Stark has never seen this river, never been this far south, but the Three-Eyed Raven has seen it many times. It is where Rhaegar Targaryen was slain by Robert Baratheon’s hammer.

Down these branches in a hundred different paths, the Three-Eyed Raven watches as two giant beasts and their riders: one a rider in White on a black dragon and the other in black on a red dragon, drive their beasts ten feet deep into the river as red rubies fly from their necks. This seems to happen down every branch in slightly different ways.

Underneath the Weirwood in Winterfell, Bran Stark’s body sits unblinking up at the snowfall.

Blinking, turning, unseeing, eyes a milky white, as he looks down the different branches for a different outcome.

Cannot find one. In each path this battle seems to happen, in one way or another. The rubies still fly, the hordes still collide, the earth burns in each. A hundred different branches all burn.

Except in one, a tiny thing. In it a red-haired queen, made even more beautiful by her grief, surrounded by wolves with an iron crown atop her head.

 

_________

 

At noon, the Lords of the North begin to murmur. The sun is highest in the sky and yet it feels as if the white would swallow everything, and only the barest light manages to break through the overcast. But here, in the Godswood, it is the only place Sansa can feel safe that they are not overheard by listening ears. Arya and Ghost ensure that. Bran too, though he sits near the roots of the Weirwood, perhaps twenty feet from them. Sansa does not know if he is visiting once more, or searching the past, present, or future.

But this is not news she wants overheard by the Dragon Queen’s spies.

“Lord Manderly is evacuating White Harbor,” she tells them, these Northern Lords and Ladies. “In doing so, he brings with him two thousand soldiers and nearly six thousand refugees.”

As Sansa expects, there is an immediate outcry from her Council.

“What of Oldcastle, my Lady—”

“—Does that mean White Harbor has fallen—”

“Ramsgate is not far from there, could Manderly not take his refugees there—”

A cacophony of voices become nothing but a thrum to Sansa’s ears, and Ghost burrs against her side and Arya _shifts_ and before it becomes too much, the Lady of Winterfell holds up a pale hand to keep them at bay, these Northern Lords.

The cacophony stops. The world falls away, the muffling of the winter snow becomes loud instead, for the absence.

She turns, surprised to find that the voices have all died. As if she had commanded them to.

Her _advice_ to the Dragon Queen still sits somewhere behind her lungs, pressing against the back of her throat and now she cannot find the words: it had been a trap, a simple trap, and by trying to appease the Dragon Queen and play the ever accommodating Lady, she had walked right into it. She could not reveal their dire straits to Jon in front of Daenerys and her Council. She could not stop him from keeping the refugees in Winterfell, though there were far more suitable strongholds to send them to: the Eyrie, or perhaps Riverrun— if it could be secured by Jaime from the remaining Lannister forces. And now the refugees of Winterfell and the whole of the North will be remaining here. And now, with House Manderly—

They do not have enough food. They don’t have enough beds, or furs, or wood to burn in their hearths. Winterfell is second only to the Red Keep and still they have beds in hallways and under stairwells, in the kennels, in the kitchens, the stables, and the Guard’s Hall.

Not to mention the tent-city that has surrounded Winterfell on all sides and grows closer to the horizon with every passing day.

“My Lords, and Lady,” Sansa begins, because she must begin somewhere and this seems a good place as any. “I do not know the fate of any of those surrounding White Harbor.”

The cacophony does not start up again as Sansa near expects it to, but a few of their loudest Lords step forward to ask their questions. “Are they evacuating because of the Dead?”

“This, I do not know,” Sansa gives them. “I have heard whispers that we have lost contact with Eastwatch-by-the-Sea, but no confirmation. The King in the North believes that it is safest to assume that the Dead have managed to make it past the Wall,” and even here, even _now_ , she is securing Jon’s crown, Sansa realizes. He does not even _want_ his crown, but she is here, with his Lords, playing the Game for him. “Jon has promised me that the Dead are slow-moving and we will have plenty of forewarning. This is not the time to panic.”

Bran has not warned them of it, either, and Sansa knows that he would.

The Three Eyed Raven whispers to the Stark children in the Godswood, and Sansa still hears Littlefinger’s voice, sometimes, late at night— _one of two things will happen. Either the dead will defeat the living, in which case, all our troubles come to an end._

The Lords thankfully do not panic. Sansa has spent the last few months with Maester Wolkan and Lord Royce preparing the Northern Houses for this exact eventuality. They have a plan in place, but White Harbor— this, she had not prepared for.

“And the treatises that were sent to the Southern Houses,” Sansa tries. “Have any of them begun shipments?”

“No, my Lady,” Lord Hornwood returns. “We did not expect to call upon them so soon. House Hightower and House Gardener have not even begun to salvage what is left after the Lannister occupation, and this last harvest was seized by Cersei.”

Sansa knows this. She knew the answer before she asked, yet it seemed the one hope they had that might have saved them. “And our grain stores as they stand now?”

“Fourteen thousand bushels, my Lady,” Maester Wolkan supplies. “Your efforts in repairing what the Boltons destroyed had miraculous results.”

A kind answer.

Sansa clasps her hands in front of her and tries to keep the mask on of Winterfell’s Lady, but her fingers have started to tremble. It’s a kind answer, and might have pleased the child that Sansa had been once— but she’s the Lady of Winterfell now. She had wanted to be a beautiful Queen, but somehow Lady Catelyn’s mantle seems much heavier than the dainty golden circlets that Cersei used to perch atop her head. Her mother would have had enough food for everyone in Winterfell and enough to spare besides.

Instead Sansa turns to Lord Royce, who seems to know the question she will ask before she asks it.

“At the current occupancy of the Castle and the surrounding encampments?” Lord Royce contemplates. “Six months, give or take, my Lady. With the Targaryen Queen and her armies, House Manderly and the occupants of White Harbor? Two.”

_Two_. Two months. Sansa cannot keep the mask in place this time, for once the ice and the cold winter winds fall away and something else replaces them, something angry, churning— the thing that had once taken root in her chest on those ramparts in King’s Landing, with Joffrey, looking at Ned Stark’s head. The thing that had thought that maybe, just maybe, she could push him to his death a hundred feet below and it would have been poetic— she would die, surely, but she would die in such a just way that surely they would have sang songs about her martyrdom for a thousand years. Sansa Stark, the little wolf of Winterfell, who died to push a tyrant boy to his death.

But instead, Sansa turns away so that these Northern Lords and Ladies will not see the mask break, and instead faces the Weirwood as her heart begins to race, as something begins to build and crawl its way up her throat, as her hands begin to shake.

For months she has made it her every waking thought to prepare the North, to care for her people— to ensure that most of them will survive the Winter. Not all of them will, no— between the mothers that will die in childbirth to the Winter children that will never see spring, to when the food stores run out and the Maesters are few and far in-between. Not even considering the possibility that Winter lasts longer than a year. If it does, they will all starve. The Dead won’t even need to kill them.

Months. And all of it gone in an instant.

She is the Lady of Winterfell— there are ten thousand people in this Keep looking to her for guidance, looking to her for reassurance, for help, for aid, for food and for wool and furs and wood for their fires because they freeze at night.

Yet there is no one for her to turn to ask for help, to ask for guidance.

Not for the first time, Sansa wishes desperately that Ned Stark had survived King’s Landing. He would have never been caught unaware like this. He would have found a way to feed every last soul.

“I shall send a raven to Lord Manderly, the fastest we have,” Sansa begins, because she must begin _somewhere_. “We will tell him that if he is to evacuate he must ensure he brings every last bushel of grain, slab of meat, and barrel of ale and wine his carriages can carry. We were fortunate that he has been sending grain shipments for months now, but it will not be enough if we do not prepare. Lord Glover,” she stops, and turns to him, as he inflates himself at being so addressed. “We will also need every fishing boat the North still has to make one last trip out to Blazewater Bay and the Bite, past the ice. One more decent haul may buy us months. Will you see to it?”

Lord Glover nods his head and gives a curt boy, “Aye, my Lady.”

He and some of the other minor Lords and Ladies depart to do Sansa’s bidding. A few remain as she tries to get her hands to cease, to _think_.

Silence fills the Godswood, but for Sansa it is still too loud. She must contact the Great Houses in the South, whichever they may be— Martell is in civil war, Tulley is gone, Arryn is here, Lannister is both defeated and undoubtedly readying what forces they have left to attack at the least opportune moment. House Tyrell is dead and gone.

The Great Houses are dead. New and Lesser Houses will replace them in time, but time is exactly what they do not have.

“Where are her supplies, my lady?” A quiet voice breaks the silence. Maester Wolkan crosses his arms in his Maester’s robes, and continues, “The Queen’s advisors speak often of the supplies coming from their ships, but we’ve yet to see a single cart.”

A wave of what Sansa can only describe as malcontent passes through those that remain in the Godswood: looks of distrust and murmurs and angry comments from individuals that Sansa understands.

She must placate them. If she cannot keep the peace here, everything outside the Godswood will fail, too—

“The North should not be filling Dothraki bellies when we cannot afford to fill our own,” Lady Lyanna adds.

Sansa herself has spent many nights wondering the same thing, wondering at what point she as Lady of Winterfell is permitted to ask after these supplies. But now she has been given no choice.

This had been a daunting task just refilling the grain stores, when she had first begun it. Ramsey had kept enough to withstand a siege for two months but most of it had been ruined during the Battle of the Bastards.

And then Jon had left on his fool’s last desperate hope for Dragonglass, leaving Winterfell in the hands of a girl that had been a Bolton last year and a Lannister the year before. The first few months she had spent deep in discussion with the Lords and the masters, formulating, planning, sending missives for food and rations, clean cloth, balms, ointments. Overseeing the supply routes, acquiring materials. Entertained the court of Lords and made them feel important, like the debts House Stark owed them could be repaid with one of Sansa’s rare smiles.

It is no small feat she has accomplished, this Sansa knows. Others would have failed.

“I will speak with them, my Lords,” Sansa allows. Outwardly she is ever the Lady of Winterfell, Catelyn-Come-Again, Ned Stark’s daughter. Her spine is straight and her armor in place. She is in Winterfell. She is strongest here. She is no longer fragile porcelain or ivory or steel but the oldest ice from the Land-of-Always-Winter that would never melt.

And something in the empty space inside her chest begins to howl.

 

_________

 

Jon cannot escape the Council until late into the evening, though he tries repeatedly after Sansa flees with her missives. He knows that he cannot waste this time, his focus must be on the Night King, on defeating the Dead. Unfortunately the vast majority of his plans require convincing Daenerys Targaryen to fly her dragons North, and not South.

But the Council is done and Jon is free of his responsibilities, he immediately heads to the Great Keep, to Sansa’s chambers. He does not know what was on that letter, but he knows that he must be at her side, whatever it is. It is where he belongs. The only place that he has felt right since his return.

The _wrongness_ had almost been gone, during the Council, had nearly vanished, and Jon felt that he was so close to grasping it he could nearly feel it slip between his fingers— he could not let that fade, now. Not after what happened in the Crypts. Not after his dreams—

Except Sansa is not in her rooms.

Her rooms are empty, and have been for some time. He sees no trace of either of his sister’s Sworn Shields, so he assumes that they are accompanying her. He whistles for Ghosts, too, just to see if he is loitering nearby, but he does not appear.

“Pardon, maid,” Jon asks, the maid does nothing but pick up her wash work, and looks as frightened as a mouse. “Do you know where the Lady of Winterfell has gone?”

“No, m’lord,” the maid manages, so quiet that Jon nearly doesn’t hear her.

At least it isn’t _your Grace_ , he finds, and nods anyway. Huffs out, “Thank you all the same.”

The maid curtseys clumsily and rebalances her wash work, but when she straightens back up again something is off, off, but Jon can't quite name it until he can, because in an entirely different voice, the maid grins and says, “Oh, come _on_ , Jon.”

“Arya,” Jon bites. Looks her over once again and thinks that it should have been obvious, he should have caught it. It may not be her face, but it is entirely Arya’s expression.

“Just a bit of fun,” Arya tells him, and gestures at the stranger’s face she wears. “And it’s useful.”

“Where’s Sansa?” Jon demands. He has no time for this— it’s late already, in a handful of hours the sun will start coming up and he’ll have to start this whole _bloody_ thing all over again.

“Gone,” Arya says, coming closer. It’s still— _strange_ — to see and hear his sister coming out of a stranger’s mouth. “She had her own Council to hold.”

Jon closes his eyes and thumps a fist against the stone wall, exhaling and letting the weight on his shoulders push him down. Of course she does. This is the mess he has made and the bed that he has lain in: he cannot help the people that he did all of this to protect and instead spends his time smiling softly at a Queen that kept him prisoner on Dragonstone and demanded his allegiance, demanded that he kneel, demanded the Seven Kingdoms because of her birthright. He left Sansa to take command instead of helping her to prepare the North.

_We have to trust each other_. _We have so many enemies now_.

There had been a time once where they _had_ trusted each other. Moments where Jon would collapse into the chair in her solar, when they weren’t the King in the North and the Lady of Winterfell, moments where they were just _Jon_ and _Sansa_. They had been rare, those nights, but Jon had clung to them on Dragonstone.

Yet last night he had glimpsed it, once again. For the first time since his return. The same creature that had said to him in Castle Black _—if we don’t take back the North, we’ll never be safe. I want you to help me, but I’ll do it myself if I have to._

Jon has not forgotten the terrors that Sansa and Arya Stark used to be. Has not forgotten the way that their fights would echo from First Keep all the way over to the Great Hall. Remembers the way that Robb and Theon and even Bran had yowled and complained about the girls and their squabbles but avidly watched when they knew no one was looking. They could not have been more different than the Sun and Moon but— he also cannot forget the way they looked in the Godswood. Like their wolves had possessed them from beyond. Two pups from the same pack. A matched pair. Opposite, yet perfect mirrors.

Jon doesn’t have all his memories from before the daggers pierced his skin. But he still has these. “What happened, between you two?”

Arya does not answer. Jon looks, after a moment, to see if she heard his question. If she knows of what he speaks.

Not-Arya smiles. It is a different kind than the last, yet just as terrifying. Something cold and hard and _fond_ , like ice— like _Sansa_ , now.

But this smile on Arya’s borrowed face still sends something down his spine that Jon cannot name. Quietly, she tells him, “We killed Littlefinger. Together. Like Lady and Nymeria might have.”

Jon swallows.

What little candlelight in the hallway flickers, casts long shadows on this stranger’s face, he is caught up in the way that Arya’s not-face morphs into something else, something like a long-dead skull where nothing but the bone remains.

And yet he remembers the feeling of Littlefinger’s throat beneath his fingers all too well, remembers how something dark had risen up in his throat, like it was trying to claw its way out of him, at the feeling that such a man was ever-hovering at his sister’s side, trying to slither his way into her good graces and into her marital bed. Jon knows the _thing_ passing over Arya’s face. Knows it too well. He has spent nights recently think of it, too, thinking of what shapes the Stark children have been broken and put back together as, a Three-Eyed Raven, a Dead Commander of the Night's Watch, a Faceless Man, and the Lady of Winterfell. Wonders what Rickon and Robb might have become, if they were all to be a matched set.

But, now, Jon thinks of how little he’s heard of what transpired— of how his Sansa, Lady of Winterfell, destroyed one of the most powerful giants in all Westeros.

“ _Wolves hunt in a pack_ ,” Arya tells him.

“The lone wolf dies,” Jon recites. “But the pack survives. Aye, Arya, I remember.”

He’d been a lone wolf for so long that Jon thinks he’s forgotten what that meant, until he’d opened the door at Castle Black and had stepped out in the cold and spotted three strangers in his courtyard. Three strangers— a girl and two knights, dour-looking and tired and cold, until the girl had turned in the snow and spotted him and suddenly everything had aligned and gone still and silent and _still_.

He remembers it, that moment, when the world had expanded and instead of _one_ wolf, there were now two. The first two Starks reunited.

“Why’d you do it, Jon.”

Jon looks over at her, this stranger-sister, and Arya’s mouth turns downward for an expression he doesn’t recognize. She is— _examining him_ , looking through him, and Jon cannot fight the urge to wrap his Stark cloak further around his shoulders.

He’s not dumb enough or brave enough to ask what she means.

He exhales and settles for, “It’s complicated.”

Jon had not intended on Kneeling, giving up the North. But after his arrival it had been made obvious, even to him, that he would not be leaving Dragonstone without paying some sort of price. Sansa had been right: it had been a trap, and Jon had been so focused on the Dragonglass that he had walked right into it. The Dragon Queen had taken his weapons and taken his ships and stranded him on an Island three hundred miles away from the Northern border— and then gone off and lost a war against Cersei Lannister, and lost the majority of her allies in the process.

“Complicated?” She laughs, but it is no laugh he recognizes. It is something unfamiliar and harsh and dark, the merciless laugh he’s heard come out of the mouths of Wildlings who kill because they can, and they want to.

It is not the laugh of Arya Stark, the little girl who had leapt into his arms when he’d given her Needle, or the laugh of the girl that had nailed the target when Bran could barely hit the outermost edge. “You sailed South and handed the Crown of the Northern Kings to a Targaryen invader. Then you went North of the Wall to capture a Wight. Then you returned to King’s Landing and stood before Cersei Lannister and _did not kill her_.”

And of all these things, it is the last that seems to unnerve her most: that he did not murder the current Queen of the Seven Kingdoms where she stood. “You would have had me kill an enemy during a peaceful Armistice?”

And Not-Arya shrugs, _shrugs_ , like it is the simplest, easiest decision he would ever need to make, like— like choosing which shirt to wear or which Direwolf pup to claim. “Cersei’s the last one on my list.”

“Your list?”

“The list of people that I’m going to kill.”

And Jon, stops, _stops_ , stops breathing like he had in the Godswood when Bran had told them that Arya had baked two Freys into pies and served them to their father, stops, because this is more than a stranger now, this is something _other_.

“Who are you,” Jon wonders. “What— what was done to you, that you have become this? You are Ned Stark’s Trueborn daughter. You are of his bloodline. You are a Stark of Winterfell.”

And if Jon intends for these words to somehow call Arya Stark back from beyond wherever she has vanished, it does not work.

She simply shrugs her shoulders once more. “Ned Stark is dead. Honor killed him. What good is honor?”

He cannot— he cannot be here, he cannot stand before this stranger and know that he’s lost both of them now, both his sisters, and Bran too, because every time Jon has spoken to the last Stark all he gets is _nothing_ , no emotion or recognition in Bran’s voice. And somewhere Jon knows that _he_ is gone, too, that Jon Snow died in the dark, at Castle Black, and the thing that uses his limbs to move is something else, something other until it all becomes too much, far too much. He turns, moves, thinks that he could go find Sam and that might recenter him, present him with something normal, something _normal_ — instead of Dragon Queens that want to burn the world and the Lady of Winterfell who won’t even look at him.

“They tried to take your crown, you know,” Arya says. “Three times. They tried to deny ever giving it to you. And all three times Sansa saved you.”

_I wish she hadn’t_ , Jon thinks. _I never wanted it in the first place_.

But Jon does not want to will those words into the world, too afraid that the Dragon Queen’s people might hear, even up here near their quarters, in a darkened hallway with not a soul in any direction. Jon takes his cloak and wraps it tighter around himself. This knowledge does nothing for him except make the weight on his shoulders feel even heavier. But he keeps on walking. Does not turn back.

This is his burden, his mistake: he’s already brought a Dragon home to Winterfell. One of his sisters will not let down the mask she wears and the other steals the faces of strangers and murders them over their dinner plates.

But still. Even as strangers. He cannot let his family get burnt by the flame.

“Be careful, Jon,” Arya’s voice, from behind him.

Something unfamiliar in the lilt of her voice makes him stop, something— _other_. He stops but does not turn more than his head, to this stranger-sister of his.

And then she says, in shadow and terrible and dark, dark like the Stranger, “You’ve become quite the lone wolf.”

 

_________

 

“Lady Sansa,” the Dragon Queen interrupts, the next morning.

The ice forms up Sansa’s spine as she turns, turns, mask of the Lady of Winterfell does not fit as well as it did yesterday. But the morning chill and soft snowfall and clinging fog somehow ground her further, like the roots of Winterfell reaching up through the ground. Yet she only finds the Dragon Queen, a full head shorter than Sansa herself. She is sans her entourage and attendants, her Council, her Dothraki and Unsullied guard, and wrapped in the whitest furs Sansa has ever seen. But still, she is alone. White in a sea of white, barely even her lips wear any color whatsoever. There are Lords and Ladies of Winterfell lying in the crypts beneath their feet that lay claim to more color.

Sansa keeps the mask firmly in place and does not let it crack, does not let the thing that howled inside her chest in the Godswood out, does not let it show that she has little patience for Dragon Queens when she has a Castle that will starve.

“I wished to speak with you this morning,” the Dragon Queen pauses, looking meaningfully at Brienne and Lord Baelish. “Alone.”

_Sometimes when I’m trying to understand a person’s motives_ , Littlefinger’s voice comes from his grave.

The Lady of Winterfell, Ned Stark’s Daughter, the Red Wolf, Catelyn-Come-Again, all of these pieces on a mask clasps her hands as any Lady should, dismisses the mere echo of Petyr Baelish and after a pause, nods.

Nods at Brienne and again, slower, more meaningfully, at Not-Littlefinger. Cannot help but remember the conversation she’d had with Arya only last night. Whispered in the Godswood when it was only the two of them alone in the snow, when all others had gone to bed, when Bran was off visiting and Jon was playing at being a Northern King— _Let me take her face, Sansa_ —

_No_ , she’d said.

“Of course, your Grace,” Sansa says.

Both of Sansa’s companions bow, though the differences between Brienne’s curt but respectful bow and Not-Littlefinger’s self-important flourish are worlds apart, leaving Sansa alone in the courtyard with the Dragon with almost no onlookers at all.

Sansa knows that they will not go far— Brienne, yes, will keep a safe but respectable distance. But _Arya_ —

She does not pretend to be able to order Arya about. Does not think she could stop her from something she set her mind to. But Sansa hopes that her command might be enough to stop the darkest thoughts that run through Arya’s head.

“I wanted to thank you, Lady Sansa,” the Dragon Queen begins, once they are safely alone in the Courtyard. “For your council in my chambers yesterday. My advisors seem to think that they know all there is to know of the North,” Daenerys tells her, like it is some great wisdom, some secret that the Dragon Queen is imparting to Sansa, some benevolent gesture. “Even Lord Snow is silent on the subject. It was refreshing to be told the truth from someone who actually knows it.”

Sansa’s armor does not crack at the use of _Lord Snow_.

She does not flinch at it, as she had with Joffrey’s crossbow. But lets it pass over, like Ramsey, when he told her he had been legitimized. _Tommen Baratheon? Another bastard_.

To the North, Jon is still King. And until Jon gets down on his knees in the Great Hall and says the words, performs the rites, and spills a drop of his own blood willingly and freely, he will _remain_ King in the North.

If this Dragon Queen does not know that, then it is not Sansa’s responsibility to inform her.

“Any help I may offer, your Grace, is yours. You need not ask,” Sansa says, but she keeps her tone cold and reserved, just like her exterior.

A Lady’s courtesy is her armor— that is what Catelyn and Septa Mordane used to say. Courtesy can do much. She is the Lady of Winterfell, entertaining Kings and Queens and Dragons, her responsibilities towards her guests are paramount. Almost as paramount as leading an army. But courtesy was not a good protector against the Illyn Paynes and Ramsay Boltons of the world. No, this lesson Sansa learned in the hardest sense.

But she is the Lady of Winterfell, and Catelyn Stark has not been resting in her grave that long.

No, this is a game. Like everything is a game, and Sansa knows how to play her part. But what is more, this Dragon Queen would find any sudden warmth suspicious. Like Sansa, she has tutors who are well versed in the Game. The mask of Sansa Stark or Alayne Stone would be too suspicious to this Dragon Queen. Sansa has spotted the masks Daenerys herself uses: gods-sent savior, beautiful blessed Trueborn heir of the Seven Kingdoms, Conquerer. Each mask has a purpose. Just like each of Arya’s stolen faces has a purpose.

A piece to be played, on the board.

Sansa gestures towards the paved path through the snow, made more from hundreds of feet walking this path every morning from one side of the courtyard to the other. Daenerys accepts, and they begin a slow pace through a muted landscape.

“I must admit,” Daenerys begins. “You were not what I expected. Tyrion told me of you, he spoke of you fondly, when we heard that you and your Lord Brother had retaken Winterfell from your husband.”

Sansa does not want, and does not need, to relive any memory of the Battle of the Bastards, or its aftermath. She has taken what she can from it, carries what she needs from it.

Perhaps it should bother her that the memory of her second husband being eaten by his own dogs is a comfort, not a torment. It should. But it does not.

“Not being what people expect is a tool of its own kind,” Sansa gives her. Gives it like it is some hidden wisdom.

Daenerys appears to process this gift of wisdom, or pretends to process it. But after a moment she continues right where she left off. “He described you as a dainty thing.”

Sansa does not hide the smile— small, not real, it is all too easy to pretend and reach for fondness. She holds nothing against Tyrion for his part in this Game, even during the Council meeting Sansa could see the ways that he was being pulled and pushed across the board. King’s Landing had been an ordeal, more than any child should have been forced to endure, but there had been… bright spots. Moments of hope that made the torment all the crueler. Sansa had not had friends in King’s Landing. Well. Not many. Shae. And— Margaery. For all that Margaery had played the Game better than Sansa ever had.

And if Daenerys takes this small little thing as a show of affection, then so be it. “A willowy creature,” she continues. Like some joke that two court Ladies share in private. “…In need of saving.”

“Lord Tyrion is too kind,” Sansa allows. “I was fortunate to find a husband who was just as adverse to the marriage as I was.”

She does not say it, but the meaning remains: _I will die in a Stark cloak_.

“And yet,” Daenerys says. “The grief you wear. I can see it in you. It’s done nothing but make you more beautiful, Lady Sansa. That is a burden that we women must carry. To be sold, or traded. Taken advantage of. Married off to the highest bidder. And when the first husband dies, to be sold off to the second until an alliance sticks.”

_Beauty is worthless. It cannot stop a war_. _Beauty cannot feed an army, beauty cannot rebuild walls_.

Grief cannot make a person more beautiful, Sansa thinks. She has seen grief. She has read Ramsay’s threats and claims and known in the center of her chest that they would never get Rickon back alive: she has seen what so many years of grief has turned her into.

“That is what they all want,” Daenerys continues. “All men. All they want is a pretty face and a warm place to fuck. It is what the Kingslayer wants. It is what Lord Baelish wants.”

Sansa stops, at this, finally understands where this Great Game is going.

She could use this opportunity to proclaim Jaime different, further plant the seed of a romance growing between the two of them. It would disrupt this obvious plan to spark an interest in a match between Stark and Lannister— the _correct_ Lannister, in this Dragon’s plan. Yet Sansa does no such thing.

Instead, she simply says. “I’m well-aware of what they want, your Grace.”

_I know what he wants_.

Petyr had reeked of what he _wanted_. He would not be dead in his unmarked grave if he had only managed to hide it a little better.

“I also heard of your ordeal, Lady Stark,” Daenerys says. Quieter, _softer_ , for a moment Sansa might even believe it had Cersei not used the same tone when she’d called her _Little Dove_. “The Boltons had a reputation even across the Great Salt Waters for being bloody and cruel. To hear that you were married to such a man for a year and forced to endure all that it brings— I knew such misfortune, once,” Daenerys says, and reaches out to touch the sleeve of Sansa’s glove, in comfort, and slows their pace. “I too was bartered for an alliance. I was married off to a Great Khal of the Dothraki when I was no more than a child in a grown woman’s dress. He raped me every night for two moons until I grew heavy with his child, as was the custom. If he had lived longer than the first year of our marriage I would have borne him many children. So I understand,” Daenerys adds. “I cannot imagine how painful it must have been for you, Lady Sansa.”

Sansa cannot move. She is not frozen of her own accord, this is not the ice crawling up her skin, but something else, something crueler.

If nothing else the reminder is enough— _more_ than enough, more than was ever needed, she relives it on her own when the thought of her former husband being eaten by his own dogs isn’t enough to keep the rest at bay.

And now Sansa stands in the courtyard of Winterfell speechless, lost, blindsided, by this Dragon Queen.

This Queen who has no idea— _no idea_ — how such pain sits in the heart.

“Yes,” Sansa gives, hollow, she sounds far away even to her own ears, can hardly hear it over the sound of her own heartbeat—because she cannot _fathom_ giving a different answer to such a question. “Yes, it was.”

There is a howl in the distance, the howl of a Direwolf, and Sansa, Sansa looks to the East like she has been called. Like that howl could travel a thousand miles and would have found her in the Red Keep in King’s Landing. Like it could have called her home.

He’s close, from the way that it echoes. From the way that the Knight’s horses tense, suddenly alert.

Sansa cannot help the swooping feeling in the pit of her stomach at his appearance, cannot help the way that her spine nearly folds at the sight of him, white and otherworldly with his muzzle coated in the blood of his breakfast, some poor hare or deer that strayed too close to the Wolfswood. Ghost has known whenever he is needed and always comes to her aid, and he comes now, low across the courtyard as fast and silent as his white legs can carry him. He does not slink around the tethered horses either, who frighten and rear back at the sight of him.

Instead he comes directly to Sansa’s side, circles her skirts three times, before he nudges his massive head against her shoulder.

The world manages to tilt back into place.

Ghost regards Daenerys as he did on that first day, neutral, but Sansa also knows that he must smell the panic trying to break the ice beneath her skin. He draws himself up, would nearly come up to Brienne’s shoulders at his full height, Sansa knows.

“He is a magnificent beast,” Daenerys croons, taking him in. “Jon has told me much about him.”

_Jon_. Before Sansa can even process the way that her brother’s name sounds coming out of her mouth, Ghost begins to burr.

She buries her fingers into the scruff at the nape of his neck, sticky with sweat, but Sansa does not mind.

Except the Dragon Queen’s appraisal has turned to something else, as Daenerys holds out a hand like she would stroke the crown of his head to the tip of his snout, like a Direwolf isn't a creature of snow and blood and old things, older things than Winterfell and the North, like a Direwolf is just a larger hound, and Ghost is tense and _wrong_.

“I would be careful, your Grace,” Sansa warns softly. “Direwolves are not Dragons, nor am I his mistress.”

Direwolves were not built for the South. No, they belonged in the cold, in winter. They belonged in the North.

“His master trusts me, my Lady,” Daenerys tells her. “Like my Dragons know that I trust your brother. They would never hurt him.”

The Dragon Queen again reaches out to let Ghost inspect her fingers but everything of Ghost’s posture is wrong _,_ _all wrong_ , like he knows how the ice feels along Sansa’s spine inside this calm, false, frozen exterior that she wears. His burrs increase in volume and his hackles raise.

Sansa grabs at Daenerys’ outstretched fingers only a second before Ghost snaps his teeth.

For a moment neither of them move, Sansa or this Dragon Queen.

They simply stand in the quiet of the morning— a Queen and a Would-be-Queen, without their guards, without their Knights and Lords and Spiders and Lions, alone. The Dragon Queen’s fingers are warm, far too warm, beneath Sansa’s own. Sansa does not particularly feel the cold, not anymore, she has too much of the North in her veins, but against Daenerys’ skin she understands it at last. Her own skin must feel like she has been buried in beneath the permafrost and the topsoil too long. Beautiful spring maiden, she is not. She has not been, not for many, _many_ years.

The Dragon Queen is just as frozen as she is, looking, _looking_ , violet eyes directed exactly into Sansa’s own, who does not flinch.

For an eternity Sansa is something other, no longer the Lady of Winterfell but the _other_ , the thing from the Godswood, frozen and ice from the Lands-of-Always-Winter, frozen in the courtyard with Wolf’s blood and the blood of Winterfell running through her. Facing down a Dragon Queen with her own beasts who could burn them all, could save them or let them perish, who somehow holds the fate of Westeros in her whims.

Sansa’s grip slackens. She is the Lady of Winterfell once more. Ned Stark’s Daughter and Catelyn-Come-Again.

Daenerys says nothing, hides behind her own mask, but does not move to touch Ghost again. She lowers her hand, but confusion marks her white brow. Like she had expected a different outcome.

“Jon belongs to Ghost like Ghost belongs to my brother. Neither is master over the other,” Sansa explains, in the quiet.

The Dragon Queen lowers her own hand, grips it with the other, like she is surprised that a full-grown Direwolf nearly took the fingers off her tiny hand.

“We are not the mothers and fathers of Direwolves, your Grace. We were born for them and they born for us. The Starks all had them, once,” Sansa offers. This is not knowledge that she minds giving away, it carries no cost to give it. “All six Stark children, when I was a child.”

And Sansa gestures to Ghost with a nod of her chin. Remembers the way that Ghost had been all on his own when Father and Robb and Theon had brought the pups home and briefly fights against the way that the memory carves into her chest. _I spent a lot of time thinking about what an ass I was to you_.

“Jon picked Ghost,” Sansa says. “Named him after a game our brothers used to play in the Crypts.”

Daenerys asks, “What did you name yours?”

“Lady,” Sansa answers, and speaks around the sudden lump in her throat.

A piece of herself that she has been too long without. The other half of her heart.

Perhaps if Lady had survived until King’s Landing, things would have been different. Perhaps Joffrey would have been too afraid to strike her, threaten her with a crossbow bolt. Perhaps Ser Illyn Payne would have been too afraid to beat her. Perhaps the Hound wouldn’t have tried so hard to frighten her. Perhaps Littlefinger would have been too frightened to wander anywhere near her.

Or perhaps Lady would have survived Ned Stark’s dagger only to die in King’s Landing just as he had.

Ghost, as if he knows where her memories stray, immediately turns from his watching the Dragon Queen and butts the crown of his head against Sansa’s shoulder. Sansa is thankful for him, her white shadow. His master has all but abandoned House Stark, hasn’t he? But Starks’ hearts rest in their Direwolves, don’t they?

It’s why her heart has been dead and quiet for so long. “She wasn’t all white, like Ghost. But she was beautiful.”

She had been gentle, too, for a Direwolf. The gentlest of all the pups and the first to come running to Sansa when she called. The one that always got left behind when the pups played in the mud.

But these are not things that Sansa wants to offer the Dragon Queen.

Still, Sansa does not even glance up from where she holds her fingers out to Ghost for him to inspect. He sniffs, lightly, barely even moving his snout. He could be catching the scent of the soap that Gilly brushed through her hair early in the morning, before the sun was up. Or breakfast. Either one.

Sansa does not intend for this to be such a powerful move: a stark contrast where Sansa could safely reach out where the Dragon Queen could not, yet she knows as it happens that it is. It has brought a silence between the two of them that grows pregnant with unsaid things.

After what seems like a small eternity, Daenerys says, “I am sorry for your loss, Lady Sansa. I, too, have lost children precious to me.”

Ghost is not her child, Ghost was born for Jon and Jon was born for Ghost. Lady was born for Sansa and Sansa born for Lady. It had been her foolish error that killed Lady. Ghost knows where her thoughts lie. He presses his side against her own and his warmth seeps through the furs and the woolen layers.

Sansa had not even felt the cold. She winds her fingers into the scruff of Ghost’s fur, and looks up, back to the Dragon Queen. “I pray that you do not lose a dragon the way that I lost Lady, your Grace.”

“And how was that?”

And even in the cold, with her fur cloak pooling around her feet, Sansa feels more at home than she ever has. She is a Stark, and she is strongest in Winterfell.

When the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives.

And Sansa Stark is surrounded by wolves. “My own foolishness,” she says, looks down at Daenerys Targaryen, the First of her Name. “And the cruelty of a beautiful Queen.”

**Author's Note:**

> OHHHH MAN. RAISE YOUR HAND IF YOU ARE READY FOR SOME ANGSTY MUTUAL PINING.
> 
> [tumblr](http://www.valorious.tumblr.com)


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